Siemens NX on Cloud with BYOL
High Performance Computing
Nebula Cloud Workbench
Enterprise SaaS
PLM on Cloud
Siemens NX on Nebula Cloud and AWS: Preferred Platform for Power Users
Global manufacturers leverage Siemens NX to give
them the most advanced design, engineering and simulation capabilities to
create amazing products and faster time to market. Traditionally, this modelling
and simulation software has been run on physical GPU workstations, which are
expensive to provision and maintain; they also prohibit the end user’s ability
to be productive from anywhere. What if it was possible to leverage the endlessly
scalable resources in the public cloud to deliver high-performance workstations
running Siemens NX, to any device, anywhere? With Nebula Cloud Workstations
on AWS, it is very much possible!
When we speak with manufacturing companies about
moving their end-user computing and data to the cloud, we find they typically
have the same concerns. Aren’t virtual desktops disreputably poor performers?
How could they possibly compare to a physical workstation? Isn’t a SaaS
solution less secure than my on-premises data center? Isn’t it more complicated
to manage SaaS-based cloud workstations than physical workstations?
There is plenty of skepticism about virtual
desktops, especially when it comes to high-performance computing use cases, but
Nebula Cloud’s innovative Cloud platform addresses these concerns so every
organization can finally realize the powerful agility benefits of cloud
desktops and workstations. Let me take a deeper dive into the individual topics
– performance, security, and on-going management – in more detail.
Low-Latency Cloud Workstations on Nebula Cloud
What are the top 3 requirements for any power user?
Ease of Use. Performance. On-Demand Computing.
It is commonly believed that cloud workstations
cannot deliver the performance achievable with a physical workstation. However,
today Nebula Cloud offers many sizes of cloud workstations, ranging from 4 to 96
CPU cores, 8 to 488 GB RAM, and 1 to 16 GB GPU memory.
What’s more, AWS leverages server-class hardware compute and memory subsystems
that can deliver a lot more horsepower than physical PCs. Loading and saving
projects can take seconds, instead of minutes to hours, over a VPN.
But hardware specs alone are not enough to
determine great performance. The latency that can exist between the user and
the cloud workstation has a dramatic effect on performance. Nebula Cloud’s Enhanced
Network Adapter architecture makes it possible to reduce the latency and
resulting in great performance. In fact, customers using Nebula Cloud
workstations have measured latency at less than 2 ms, which makes the
experience of rotating or panning models indistinguishable from physical
workstations. Want to see it in action? Here is a quick demo by Siemens and Nebula Cloud.
Self-Service SaaS Platform Delivers Enterprise Security
You might be thinking that SaaS, by definition,
means shared infrastructure, and sometimes it does. This is why customers have
raised concerns about placing sensitive engineering data in public cloud
infrastructure, fearing it might become co-mingled with a competitor’s data,
opening the possibility of accidental or intentional data loss or theft.
Nebula Cloud is different. Our Enterprise Desktop
Cloud platform is the only 100% cloud-native SaaS cloud desktop solution that
separates the control layer from the data layer. Nebula Cloud Control has a
web-based UI that enables IT to provision, monitor, and manage their global
cloud desktop fleet from a single console. Nebula Cloud leverages the standard AWS
model for the data layer, so each customer’s data is fully isolated in their
own AWS subscription.
Nebula Cloud compliments Bring Your Own License (BYOL)
concept where customers can bring their existing on-premise software licenses to
use them on cloud. Customers can take advantage of PAYG pricing for the HPC and GPU computing cloud infrastructure.

Nebula
Cloud with HPC optimized software on AWS:
Nebula Cloud’s SaaS model provides major security benefits that you may not have with physical
workstations or SaaS-hosted applications:
1. Full security isolation to run Siemens NX
without fear of mixing data with other companies.
- 2. Your information security team can bring the
same security suite – data loss prevention (DLP), anti-virus/malware,
multi-factor authentication (MFA), etc., – used with your physical
desktops to Nebula Cloud.
- 3. All engineering data is kept in your company’s
own AWS subscription. Nebula Cloud does not have access to this data at
any time.
4. Unlike physical workstations, data never leaves IT’s security
boundary and can be prevented from landing on endpoints.
- 5. All data at rest is encrypted with AWS-managed
keys and your corporate credentials.
6. Nebula Cloud does not have access to
keys or credentials to access data.
- 7. Manage your employee and contractor
credentials with your corporate authentication / identity provider, such
as Active Directory, independent of Nebula Cloud.
- 8. Manage remote users and external contractors
in separate subnets, and you can require conditional access with posture
checks for minimum PC patch / security levels, along with MFA for
additional security.
- 9. Revoke user access instantly. You can’t do
this with physical PCs if the data is already on that PC.
Most companies
with sensitive data use APIs to automate the revocation of access to cloud
workstation and other resources. Monitor the access and usage for all users
globally, including contractors, as Nebula Cloud offers APIs for
integration with your security information and event management (SIEM)
system.
Why Do It Yourself
When You Can Have SaaS?
Nebula Cloud’s Desktop Control Fabric can span all AWS
regions today and will instantly adapt when new regions are added by AWS.
Most customers deploy their cloud workstations across 2-7 cloud regions to
ensure the best workstation performance. And with single pane of glass
management of all your cloud desktops, end-user computing complexity is
history. Nebula Cloud provides a self-service portal where users can select the
choice of hardware accelerator and complete the entire customer life cycle processes
in a matter of minutes, even from trial to production use, all from one place.
Nebula Cloud provides access to Amazon EC2 GPU
instances that deliver a powerful combination of CPU, host memory, and GPU
capacity. G3, G4 and P3 instances are ideal for graphics-intensive applications
such as 3D visualizations, mid to high-end virtual workstations, virtual
application software, 3D rendering, application streaming, video encoding,
gaming, and other server-side graphics workloads.

The Industry’s
Fastest Time-to-Value
That all sounds great so far, right? But how long
does it take to get up and running with Nebula Cloud? That is Nebula Cloud’s
secret sauce. Unlike do-it-yourself solutions where IT has to build, optimize,
and then maintain a secure, high-performance cloud desktop service, Nebula
Cloud’s Enterprise Desktop Cloud is a SaaS platform that delivers cloud
desktops and workstations globally. Our SaaS cloud desktops feature an
industry-leading 99.95% SLA. Plus, our amazing customer success team works with
you to optimize the platform for your corporate image, applications, and
security stack, as well as ensuring that all your users experience outstanding
performance – even the most demanding users!
Want to learn more about how Nebula
Cloud is helping manufacturing companies improve security, performance and
productivity? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how it
works!