Dell drives workstation innovation with European Centre of Excellence

Earlier this year, Dell opened its first Virtual Workstation Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Round Rock, Texas to provide customers and partners with the necessary resources and expert advice to help them leverage virtualized workstations and architect a solution to best suit their business needs.

Dell is delighted to announce that the Dell Solutions Centre in Limerick, Ireland, has now expanded to include its first European Virtual Workstation Centre of Excellence.

By providing a physical location with remote access capabilities, Dell customers, channel partners and independent software vendors will be able to replicate and test their desired configuration or full end-to-end model to ensure the hardware and software environment meets their requirements. This will help more European organisations transition their environments, allowing customers to safely access their data from multiple devices and locations - supporting better collaboration and increased productivity for today’s dispersed teams.

Customers will also be able to schedule meetings with virtualization specialists to discuss their unique IT infrastructure challenges, overcome any concerns they may have about no longer having physical workstations on every desk, and explore how Dell technology and applications can enhance their end users performance, mobility and security.

European customers such as Caterham F1 Team are already benefitting from the adoption of virtualised workstation solutions. Over the past year the team’s designers, responsible for developing the car’s aerodynamics, have replaced Dell Precision workstations with Dell Wyse zero clients. These small black boxes now sit alongside high-definition monitors and connect designers to the rack-mounted Dell Precision workstations residing in the data room, which provides access to all the high-end design programmes they use every day.

The solution has assisted Caterham F1 Team in moving towards reducing the number of devices tied to individuals, reducing the cost, time spent and power consumed managing multiple devices and helping to lower noise and heat levels in the office. Furthermore, it’s helped to simplify overall processes and improve flexible working capabilities.

“It is better that designers are not tied to one particular desk. They regularly need to physically move locations when they hook up with different units across the team. Anything we can do to simplify that change is good for the business and for the designers.” Alistair Gardiner, HPC Support Engineer at Caterham F1 Team.

As an end-to-end solutions provider, Dell has thousands of conversations with customers each day, and strongly believes that organisations should be able to talk through solutions and see them in action before having to commit to a decision. The Centre of Excellence will allow local and remote customers to carry out performance benchmarking, subjective user-assisted testing, and even help customers to choose the right endpoint devices and monitors - paving the way for more European customers to test drive applications and explore workstation solutions.