Ultimate Cloud Workstations: Performance Beyond Hyperscalers
In 2020, BOXX introduced BOXX Cloud, an offering for organizations with demanding remote workstation needs that go beyond traditional cloud-based solutions. BOXX Cloud is designed to be flexible to work in conjunction with your existing infrastructure—whether hosted by BOXX, on premise at a client site, or with hyperscaler cloud providers. BOXX Cloud’s ultimate goal, regardless of where you ultimately host your remote workstations, is to deliver the performance and service other solutions can’t provide, empowering your most demanding users to work more efficiently—regardless of their physical location.
We created BOXX Cloud to address the challenges our customers faced in providing robust and performant remote computing options for their end users. Developing FLEXX, a groundbreaking BOXX hardware solution, was key, differentiating BOXX Cloud to provide the performance each user needs. For example, in benchmarks, BOXX Cloud outperformed major cloud hyperscaler platform instances with up to 3x higher model creation performance in software like SOLIDWORKS and Revit and dramatically increased V-ray rendering performance by 10x.
Offering that hardware as a service or a purchase ensures flexibility other vendors can’t offer. Over and over again, the response from our customers included details of how they attempted to deliver remote offerings with technologies like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and found the learning curve excessive. They also encountered numerous challenges during and post deployment. It was imperative that BOXX Cloud simplified onboarding, even for teams with limited expertise in remote computing, and delivered exceptional ongoing support superior to hyperscaler cloud providers.
BOXX provides the right performance for demanding AEC and M&E workflow needs
BOXX understands that professional workflows in segments like AEC and M&E contain a wide variety of user personas and applications that make up an end-to-end complete workflow. From top engineers and architects, to designers, artists, and other creators, it’s essential to provide these users access to performance-optimized platforms from anywhere. With many organizations’ increased emphasis on work-from-anywhere or the needs of supporting branch offices, high performance, and remote-accessible workstations have become a key requirement for any project.
In designing remote workstation technology, BOXX went a step beyond traditional remote platforms currently on the market by starting at the core with the FLEXX hardware platform. Purpose-designed for high-density, datacenter-hosted delivery of remote workstations, FLEXX was developed with optimal power and cooling. FLEXX nodes ensure each workstation session can run the latest high-performance CPUs and GPUs while providing optimal memory and storage. FLEXX eliminates the need to use virtualization, instead providing cost-effective dedicated nodes for each user. In special instances (and if truly needed), virtualization can be supported. Manageability features are built-in, allowing IT to self-support the FLEXX platform easily without a deep learning curve. FLEXX provides all of the above in a compact ½U or 1U form factor.
“FLEXX is such a tight, powerful little system and it works really well,” says Benroth. “You get the space savings, you get the great BOXX support, and you get more features and robust performance.”
Along with these innovative features and superior performance, FLEXX/BOXX Cloud is also affordable. In fact, it delivers high performance at price points on par with competitive offerings while providing unique money-saving consolidation capabilities that match user counts to real needs. This leads to even greater operational savings.
TNP, Inc.’s Dughman considers the cost savings derived from pooling systems another key benefit since BOXX Cloud supported that request when TNP Inc.’s previous provider would not. “Our VDI provider required us to pay for a machine 365 days a year whether it was used or not,” he says. “It made no sense from a business perspective. The ability to pool systems, utilize them effectively and not leave machines sitting idle while still covering our DR needs, saved us at least two hundred thousand dollars annually.”
We focus on the needs of the most demanding user workflows
Within your end-to-end workflow, you have users with different expertise requiring different performance needs. For an entry-level designer, engineer, or artist, a traditional cloud hyperscaler instance may suffice. However, the majority of your users who demand more of their workstation notice the lackluster performance and extra time required to complete tasks, especially as compared to a desk side workstation. With BOXX Cloud, even entry-level instances or FLEXX configurations outperform the most ideal hyperscaler instances for remote workstation needs. With more complex design, assemblies, engineering, or modeling, higher performance instances with more capable CPUs, higher performance GPUs and more memory, can be provided to better match delivering a workflow on time.
BOXX purposely designs configurations in products like FLEXX to be optimized for the applications in your workflow. In many AEC applications, this means higher, single-threaded CPU performance which is challenging for hyperscalers. In M&E, it may mean providing what would typically be a desk side, workstation class, high performance GPU. Hyperscalers rely on virtualization for greater density, building platforms which contain multiple CPU cores, but then must sacrifice CPU clock performance, thereby punishing application performance. This requirement for virtualization provides additional complexities like specialized GPUs that may not be officially supported by your workflow applications, thus causing problems when application issues arise. With FLEXX, on the other hand, high clock CPUs are standard, high-performance workstation GPUs are provided, and overall system architecture is designed to perform and feel like a desk side workstation—with all the aspects of a manageable, data-center hosted environment.
Unique to this FLEXX platform is the ability to subscribe to cloud hosted and managed instances for your users, operated by BOXX Cloud as managed services. You may also deploy FLEXX in your own on premise data center or co-location data center. This hybrid approach allows complete flexibility to do what is right for your organization. It can also support a mix of users hosted by BOXX Cloud in addition to onsite users who could be deployed from an on premises FLEXX environment. For most use cases, operating solely with BOXX Cloud as a managed service is the optimal scenario. However, every organization is unique. The option to purchase FLEXX hardware for on premise use is best suited to specific sites with poor internet connectivity or users dealing with exceptionally large datasets in conjunction with ultra-latency sensitive applications like VR or AR.
Regardless of the hybrid approach you take, BOXX Cloud is designed to work with your existing infrastructure. If you rely on distributed storage with a hyperscaler like AWS, this can be extended to BOXX Cloud-hosted instances and to an on premise FLEXX environment. With BOXX Cloud, you leverage the best capabilities from the services and technologies you use today, while providing a better, higher performance workstation offering to your users, unmatched by anything hyperscalers can currently provide.
An important aspect of BOXX Cloud is the expertise offered by our team who know your applications and workflow well. In fact, we work closely with customers in order to match the proper performance needs for your workflow to the instances we offer. BOXX understands unique user personas and the varying use case needs of each. We go beyond in helping plan deployments and any transition from legacy environments which will be replaced by BOXX Cloud. Our level of support during deployment planning and deployment itself has earned high praise from our customers, from customer IT teams with deep technical knowledge, to those looking for further technical assistance.
Even better, after end users are live and on boarded, they will continue to receive standard complimentary BOXX technical support. This ensures that your users’ uptime is well maintained with ongoing solution security and performance.
BOXX Cloud success is due to the ecosystem we have assembled. It defines our reference architecture and ensures customers experience a robust solution tailored to their specific workflows. Each customer works closely with us to identify unique aspects of networking, storage, and security. We even allow the customer-owned hardware for those needs to be supported in our hosted data center. In addition, partnering with vendors like Leostream (for user and instance manageability) and HP Anyware + NICE DCV (for no-compromise remote instance delivery), enables BOXX to offer complete configuration and support of all essential tools and services. This is essential in order to provide and manage an exceptional remote experience. Along with data egress, all of these services are included in our base pricing.
With BOXX Cloud-hosted workstations, you get industry-leading performance at a competitive price. *system configurations Unique to BOXX Cloud is the ability to pool workstations for user types based on simultaneous usage needs. This provides users with their own desktop experience while assigning an at-connection time remote workstation from the assigned pool, thus greatly saving costs. Here’s an example: You have a team of 50 architects or designers. At any given time, no more than 30 of them are working simultaneously. With BOXX Cloud, you deploy for 30 modules and some excess in case more users do require access. This saves on monthly costs. With traditional hyperscalers, every known user gets assigned a virtual machine that incurs costs for storage and other needs—even when powered off.
Our pricing is a simple per instance model subscription and we take pride in helping our customers secure a predictable and easy to calculate price in a world of often mind-numbingly complex cloud computing pricing models. Everything needed to operate as a true remote workstation offering is included with BOXX Cloud with no surprises or bill-shock from additional charges.
For those considering the FLEXX hardware hosted on-premises option, BOXX will configure with all the appropriate technologies we use in our hosted offering to ensure similar capabilities. We then work with you to understand the ongoing annual costs for these technologies outside of the hardware purchase, ensuring continued support for your end users.