Maximize the use of your infrastructure!
VDI by Day, Compute by Night
At ITQ, we love to work in projects where we can use innovative technologies to help the customer go the extra mile. What the extra mile means depends on the industry or nature of the organization. In some cases, we helped the customer to scale out their resources to be able to handle a predicted extra demand on their platform. Other examples are upgrades of an entire VMware stack or design and deploy of any of the VMware technologies. In this case, we were able to help a customer that most people in The Netherlands know as a place you rather not visit.
In the last 18 months, you may have seen or heard about the work we have done with the Dutch Cancer Institute and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek hospital (NKI-AVL). A couple of years ago, NKI-AVL developed a new strategy for their datacenter and workspace. An important part of that strategy was to fully support their goals of curing cancer, but also focus on patient care. As NKI-AVL made the choice to use VMware technologies for both their Software-Defined Datacenter and Digital Workspace, ITQ was brought in to help the customer to assess, design, and implement the new technologies, but also to help them migrate to these new platforms.
In an early stage of the design phase of the project, our team discovered that based on the assessment results, the majority of the employees of the customer could benefit from a so-called Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) due to the nature and behavior of their applications. GPUs and in particular NVIDIA GPUs can accelerate graphical workloads. Especially with Virtual Desktops, an NVIDIA GPU can make a real difference in something we call User Experience. Because of the massive computational power of a GPU, they are also quite often used for other workloads which require a lot of parallel processing power, such as Artificial Intelligence.
So, for one of the biggest oncology research hospitals in the world, you can imagine that the more of those GPUs are available, the more research they can do, and the faster they can get results.
By using technologies from VMware and NVIDIA, our team has developed a methodology called VDI by Day, Compute by Night in which the GPUs that were used for User Experience by day can also be used for oncology research by night. If you would like to know more about this topic, our partner NVIDIA has released a reference case, which can be downloaded here.
On the 10th of June, our Technologist on EUC and AI, Johan van Amersfoort and Roel Sijstermans, Manager IT at NKI-AVL, will keynote at NVIDIA’s Enterprise Innovation Days and talk about this project where innovative technologies were used to truly make a difference.
If you would like to know more about the technologies used, Johan van Amersfoort will also present a deep dive into the AI platforms used on the 11th of June.
You can register here for this online event which will be held from the 9th until the 11th of June.
Want to know more how we can help you with innovative ways and maximize the use of your infrastructure? Contact us and we will tell you more.
