Your newly-bought Japanese car was probably designed via VDI

Overcoming design challenges during the year-long pandemic has caused car manufacturers to resort to high-performance 3D CAD via virtual desktop infrastructures ( vdi ).

The next time you visit a car showroom, you can see how digitalization has made designing cars easier and faster even during the global pandemic.

For car maker Toyota, its Engineering Design Group was not able to support a remote-work model for all employees. Team members had to work from their physical workstations in the office whenever working on design projects using 3D CAD software. In addition, the DX Promotion Division was facing challenges with workstation maintenance and procurement costs.

To solve the issue, the firm decided to leverage hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) to build a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment that can support high-performance applications and run 3D CAD software. The incumbent system had to support the Virtual Graphics Processing Unit (vGPU) functions required to render 3D graphics in HCI virtual environments.

In addition, the system had to be flexible and scalable in ways that helped the remotely-distributed design team to respond quickly to changing business demands. The solution they settled on was hosted on a cloud platform that enabled a VDI environment for approximately 1,000-devices and was up-and-running far ahead of the firm’s initial schedule.

Workarounds with added benefits

The Engineering Design Group was enabled to work around the remote-working constraints without interruptions. In addition to expanding work-style options for employees in the group, the move to Nutanix helped enable the car maker to consolidate shared and underutilized workstations into its VDI environment, with the aim of eventually cutting the number of workstations to approximately half, which would also result in significant cost reductions.

Said the car maker’s DX Promotion Division’s Masanobu Takahisa: “Moving forward, our plan is to roll out similar systems not only to Toyota Motor but also to Toyota group companies. In the future, we hope to also support CAE software on the VDI environment, and continue to promote work-style reform in the Engineering Design Group.”

According to Matt Young, SVP (Asia Pacific and Japan), Nutanix: “TOYOTA is a leading global company in the manufacturing industry, enabling employees to embrace the future of work. We are proud to have helped TOYOTA implement a new way of working, which was previously thought to be difficult to achieve.”