Global CAD access with Citrix XenDesktop HDX Pro 3D

The power and automation technology group ABB has recently made user workstations with worldwide distributed CAD applications available as virtual desktops. Thanks to the HDX™ Pro 3D graphics technology of Citrix® XenDesktop®, now even people in India can work productively with graphics-intensive applications that are hosted at a datacenter in Switzerland. The solution facilitates collaboration of globally organized teams and ensures that all design data remains in one central location. At the same time, ABB developers gain flexibility; access to the CAD workstation is now possible with any device.

ABB is a leading global supplier of energy and automation technology. The company has 124,000 employees in over 100 countries and generated total sales of more than USD 31.5 billion in 2010. The Schweizer Landesgesellschaft (Swiss national company) based in Baden is also involved in this global network. ABB Schweiz AG carries the global responsibility for numerous products and systems within this affiliated group.

Globalization has had a significant impact on the business of ABB in recent years: rising global energy demand, the increasing integration of renewable energies and the evolution of intelligent networks opened many new market opportunities to the group. An ever-growing share of sales is now being generated in emerging regions such as China and India. In order to be closer to customers in these growth markets and to work simultaneously and most cost-efficiently, ABB is investing continuously in R&D and engineering resources on site. As part of this process, it was decided to open a global engineering center for the Business Unit Power Electronics & MV Drives in Bangalore, India. The schedule for the project was estimated to be relatively brief and the unit was expected to be operational within seven months.

Network was a bottleneck for globalization project

This project was associated with enormous challenges for the responsible IT organization in Switzerland. The users in India needed access to many business applications—in particular, the CAD applications Solid Edge and E•.series. The central engineering databases for this area, however, were previously hosted exclusively in Switzerland. “The company’s internal network infrastructure presented a bottleneck in this situation, of course,” said Adrian Seiler, Discrete Automation & Motion Local Division IS manager of ABB in Switzerland. “Our WAN links are generally not designed for extensive construction plans whereby each processing step is transferred from Switzerland to India and then back again.”

A possible solution scenario would have been to build a local database in India and to connect via replication mechanisms with the databases in Switzerland. However, creating the necessary adjustments to processes and information flows would not have been possible in the short project period. Moreover, this solution would have generated significant data traffic on the WAN.

The IT managers were concerned, therefore, with different technical ways to bridge the distance between India and Switzerland. “In some areas of the company we have been using Citrix XenApp for years in order to make standard applications such as Microsoft Office and SAP available centrally for several distributed sites,” says Seiler. “Our idea was to make the CAD applications available remotely in India as well. Due to the high resource requirements of the applications a pure XenApp solution was not suitable for it; we therefore decided to evaluate the capabilities of the new HDX 3D technology of Citrix XenDesktop.”

Making professional 3D applications available over the WAN

HDX™ 3D Pro Graphics is a feature of the Citrix® XenDesktop® desktop virtualization solution that makes it possible to provide even high-end applications over LAN and WAN connections. Typically, these are OpenGL- or DirectX-based graphics applications that require hardware acceleration of a dedicated graphics processor (GPU). With HDX 3D these applications can be used productively starting with a WAN bandwidth of 2 Mbits per user. The Citrix technology also supports large geographical distances and round-trip latency of up to 200 milliseconds. HDX Pro 3D also offers  advantages for the LAN, since the solution requires about 90 percent less bandwidth than other available products on the market.

With technical support from Citrix Consulting Services, the IT department of ABB Schweiz first built a test environment for their specific application scenario and their first step was to set up  the XenDesktop Desktop Delivery Controller. This server component is responsible for establishing the connection between users and the centrally operated desktops and applications. The actual CAD workstations—Windows XP™ desktops with all necessary applications— were installed on high-performance workstations at an external datacenter. Each of the computers was equipped with an Nvidia Quadro FX graphics card supported by the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The project team then implemented the XenDesktop Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) on these workstations as well as the HDX Pro 3D Graphics software.

The HDX Pro 3D component compresses the image data before it is sent from the host computer over the network to the user. In connection with the CUDA technology, HDX Pro 3D can also use the computing power of the GPU for the compression of the rendered CAD graphics. In this way the bandwidth requirements are minimized and high-performance  WAN access is ensured. The decompression of the data stream is assumed by the HDX Pro 3D graphics client that is installed on the user’s device.

Performance and convenience as key factors

The client hardware of the end user does not require a special graphics processor for the presentation of the applications; ABB worked mostly with standard notebooks as part of the test scenario. However, one large external screen and a 3D mouse were connected as they are commonly used for CAD applications. “We, of course, had to provide some proof that the usability is not limited by the solution,” said Manuel Killer, project manager, CAx Technology responsible for the Discrete Automation & Motion division Switzerland. “Therefore it was important to test from the beginning under realistic conditions.”

XenDesktop and the HDX Pro 3D technology were able to convince IT managers very quickly: “The first impressions in our LAN environment were already quite impressive: the desktop performance and integration of peripheral devices functioned smoothly,” reported Killer. “The CAD users in India have confirmed that they can work productively with the Citrix technology. Within a relatively short period we had found a solution that best fit our needs.”  

Thus, ABB was capable of starting up the new global engineering center on time. The XenDesktop infrastructure provides the company with not only the required application performance, but also a high degree of safety. Sensitive design data always remains in the protected datacenter and is never stored on unsecured devices. In addition, ABB will benefit from the flexibility of the solution. Several months after the pilot project, when a new R&D team was set up in Poland, the IT organization simply extended the infrastructure and made the CAD workstations available from Switzerland for the additional users.

Interesting solution for local CAD jobs as well

In order to manage the growing number of host computers in the future even more efficiently, the IT managers plan to implement the provisioning services functionality of XenDesktop soon. The technology makes it possible to stream a master image to the user’s desktop on demand to any number of physical or virtual machines. Changes to the software configuration, therefore, do not need to be made to each desktop, but only once to the master image.

The permanent assignment of physical workstations to certain users can thus be avoided; only when the user logs in is he/she assigned a desktop from the existing pool. XenDesktop then loads the individual settings and personal information of the user in the base image. This desktop pooling can help the company to continue to cut costs in the future. Basically, the IT organization does not need to make a physical workstation available for each user but just for the maximum number of concurrent users.

“The XenDesktop solution will be very interesting in the future for our local CAD jobs in Switzerland,” says Seiler. “Until now we have had to deal frequently with the peculiarities of heterogeneous client devices—by contrast, the new desktop concept provides users with a single platform, high performance and also the flexibility to work anywhere.” The first practical impressions show that the ABB employees appreciate the advantage of mobility, in particular: the CAD workstation is no longer tied to a desk in the office, but wherever the need arises, on the road or in the home office.