Project Brief

This Digital transformation project included cloud adoption and full cost optimization to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) and improve the student and faculty experience.

The Challenge

The Entertainment Arts faculty found themselves struggling with the expense of running their graphic and 3D systems for their students, their coursework and their internal processes. The cost of running a GPU VDI environment (Graphical Processing Unit, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) in an on premises environment (Hosted Solution) was proving to be expensive. Even if they went on a single cloud platform, their costs were still too high to meet acceptance criteria.

Our Solution

Cloud Architect Experts design that includes high graphic intensive compute systems, hosted in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform and accessed using a virtual desktop infrastructure.

As a fail safe, Cloud Architect Experts implemented a second cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, to keep users up and running in milliseconds of transition if the AWS environment has delays in allocating the compute power needed, for whatever reason.

Value Delivered

This design allows our large universities to reduce the per-user costs by up to 65%, and by at least 10% if redundancy is utilized. In addition, the solution, with its inherent automation tools (Terraform and Ansible), has reduced the management overhead costs, and provided:

Results

1. Three large universities now can host the GPU enabled VDI in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
2. The TCO has been reduced to acceptable levels
3. User experience has improved