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!