The Genesis of our BIM Cloud

BIM and the Cloud

I recently wrote an article, “BIM and the Cloud” that was published on www.aecbytes.com.  It has been well received, particularly in these recessionary times.  Why would a business owner care about this techy-talk?  It is true that necessity is the mother of invention, but there was more to the formulation of this BIM cloud.  An owner strives to maximize the use of their assets—no matter what kind of assets.  It only stands to reason that if your assets are fully utilized (100%), you are getting the most work done for the least amount of assets (and cost).  Servers are very expensive, especially when you need lots of them.  Most hardware that is dedicated to a single function is not fully utilized all the time.  Using virtualization technology, we are able to “load up”, “cram”, “pack in” or whatever you want to call it all required servers onto one physical server (btw…back in the 60’s/70’s we called this a mainframe but I digress).  This saves a ton of cash.  The industry was working on solutions to be able to do the same thing with our desktops.  But because of this recession, I couldn’t wait.  Our business had strategic needs that required more processing power and we did not have the money to buy more laptops or desktops.  That’s what you call a CIO pickle. Taking a page from the 1980’s playbook of remote computing or network computing or Xserver or hosted computing (pick your pre-cloud term), I thought why can’t we do the same thing with our Windows desktops? I spec’d out a rack-mounted workstation that had an obscene amount of computing resources—way more than our applications need today.  This box was very expensive.  In order to get the numbers to work, we needed to max out its utilization.  The only way to do that is to load up more than one user (like we load up more than one virtual server).  Since we already knew our applications worked in an RDP environment, all we needed was to share the box with multiple RDP users.  I issued that challenge to Tommy and he found an application to do just that.

Cloud computing isn’t rocket science but it does take much thought and planning.  IT strategies are generally multi-year endeavors.  The good decisions you make today generally bear fruit in 2-3 years. By looking at our hardware numbers, I had to whack the IT spend.  This created a functional gap that had to be filled.  What came first—the BIM cloud or the Dashboard dilemma?  It was the dashboard dilemma.  That’s why I purposely put fiscal constraints on the problem even if we have the money—it leads to innovation.

Posted by Chubby CIO at 2/24/2010 9:36 AM
Categories: Hardware
 

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