We are always reviewing our methodologies for deploying Pro/E & other software. As new capabilities become available, we wonder if we can leverage them to improve productivity and/or reduce costs.
Recently, the topic of licensing and hosting came up. If your company has done any of the following for Pro/E or other compute-intensive applications, I would like to hear about of your successes.
* On-Demand licensing. Software as a service. We are like most companies. We buy licenses, and pay annual maintenance. However, our actual needs vary from year to year, and sometimes from month to month. Therefore, the number of licenses we have are to ensure we can handle the worst-case scenario. The result is that we use only 1/3 of our licenses 95% of the time. We envision a future environment where we only pay for the licenses we actually use (maintenance or lease). Imagine an "odometer" that tracks how long the licenses are checked-out. At the end of each month/quarter/year, we would pay the vendor a fee based upon the accumulated usage during the period. Has PTC ever done anything like this, or discussed the possibility? Otherwise, might there be an equivalent method? * Hosted compute environment. Using hosted servers is nothing new. In fact we already have a Windows terminal server so that our UNIX users have access to Windows applications. They access the server with a UNIX version of the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) client.
But imagine if all users had a simple, low-end PC, that acted only as a terminal client. Everyone would RDC to a terminal/blade server. The blade/virtualization software would balance the loads to ensure that everyone get the computing power they need.
As software become more demanding, we add better blades to the server, but would not need to change anything at the user's desk. Software would be rolled out at the server only, eliminating desktop installation issues.
However, I would be concerned about graphic performance for Pro/E and other 3D applications (OpenGL).
Any thoughts?
Gerry Champoux Williams International Lead Engineer 2280 E. West Maple Road Information Technology Walled Lake, MI 48390 ' (248) 960-2816 7 (248) 960-2607 * - * www.williams-int.com
Gerry Work out how many licences you need and reduce the total by 10-20%, when you come to upgrade to the next version if you don't have enough licences then just pay the back maintennace, if the elapsed time is 12mths + you only pay 9 months back maintenance. In that way you can reduce the licence count and just review it before doing an upgrade and potentially save money.
Ian Turner
CAD Manager
Cobham Mission Equipment
Tel: +44 (0)1202 857747
-
Flight Refuelling Ltd trading as Cobham Mission Equipment. www.cobham.com
Registered office: Brook Road, WIMBORNE, Dorset, BH21 2BJ, England
Registered number 293529 UK
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Have tried this with Citrix and the graphics performance is unacceptable.
In Reply to Gerry Champoux:
We are always reviewing our methodologies for deploying Pro/E & other software. As new capabilities become available, we wonder if we can leverage them to improve productivity and/or reduce costs.
Recently, the topic of licensing and hosting came up. If your company has done any of the following for Pro/E or other compute-intensive applications, I would like to hear about of your successes.
* On-Demand licensing. Software as a service. We are like most companies. We buy licenses, and pay annual maintenance. However, our actual needs vary from year to year, and sometimes from month to month. Therefore, the number of licenses we have are to ensure we can handle the worst-case scenario. The result is that we use only 1/3 of our licenses 95% of the time. We envision a future environment where we only pay for the licenses we actually use (maintenance or lease). Imagine an "odometer" that tracks how long the licenses are checked-out. At the end of each month/quarter/year, we would pay the vendor a fee based upon the accumulated usage during the period. Has PTC ever done anything like this, or discussed the possibility? Otherwise, might there be an equivalent method?
* Hosted compute environment. Using hosted servers is nothing new. In fact we already have a Windows terminal server so that our UNIX users have access to Windows applications. They access the server with a UNIX version of the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) client.
But imagine if all users had a simple, low-end PC, that acted only as a terminal client. Everyone would RDC to a terminal/blade server. The blade/virtualization software would balance the loads to ensure that everyone get the computing power they need.
As software become more demanding, we add better blades to the server, but would not need to change anything at the user's desk. Software would be rolled out at the server only, eliminating desktop installation issues.
However, I would be concerned about graphic performance for Pro/E and other 3D applications (OpenGL).
Any thoughts?
Gerry Champoux Williams International Lead Engineer 2280 E. West Maple Road Information Technology Walled Lake, MI 48390 ' (248) 960-2816 7 (248) 960-2607 * - * www.williams-int.comhttp://www.williams-int.com
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