At Huckabee, the primary objective is “to provide our architects with the ability to get work done. That they can work anywhere is a really big deal to us,” said Aaron Hall, Huckabee Senior Network Architect.

Huckabee first considered issuing high powered laptops to their 50+ engineers, but dismissed that approach after evaluating the cost to purchase them, secure them, encrypt the data on the hard drive, and manage revision control. The lack of security by using laptops was also a huge concern.

Autodesk’s End User License Agreement specifies a one-to-one relationship between the licensee and his/her dedicated machine, which dictated the use of laptops, traditional PCs, or something better – Blade PCs. Even if shared environments were permitted in the licensing sense, we would not consider it for performance rea-sons, said Hall.

THE CHALLENGE

• Wanted to lean on their current investment in Citrix XenDesktop.
• Had 50+ architects working from various remote sites on a regular basis.
• Autodesk’s License Agreement specifies a dedicated 1:1 relationship between the software and the compute resource

THE SOLUTION

ClearCube offered A6106D Blade PCs rack mounted in the data center to provide Host-side rendering resources to the architect regardless of the end point used or the physical work location. The solution also included NVIDIA GPUs to satisfy the architect’s need for rendering and image processing.

“We did our cost analysis and determined that Clear-Cube A Series Blade PCs with dedicated NVIDIA GPUs were in the same price range as powerful laptops, but they offered so much more in reduced administration costs, higher uptime, and complete security that we de-ployed more than 50 ClearCube Blade PCs in our data center,” said Hall.

Huckabee chose XenDesktop because it was optimized for performance of their WAN connections that many of their architects use. They found that bandwidth consumption was only about 90k per connection. In addition, they found that the Citrix XenDesktop environment is easy to manage.

Autodesk, in particular, has very specific chipset requirements, which were satisfied by ClearCube’s A Series Blade PCs. In addi-tion, A Series supports the latest P2000 and P4000 GPU adapters. ClearCube’s M Series supports dou-ble slot GPUs such as the P5000 and P6000 series.

THE BENEFIT

Huckabee was able to retain its investment in Citrix XenDesktop. For a similar cash outlay for workstation caliber PCs, the A-Series Blade solution provided superior up-time, complete security, and less administrative costs.

Huckabee, deployed ClearCube Blade PCs in a unique way by using Citrix XenDesktop and VDA cli-ent to enable their architects and drafts- men the ability to work on their AutoCAD and Revit files from anywhere office, home, and via mobile devices.