Case Study: Bishop Auckland College achieves 20x faster 3D performance with Phoenix Software’s VMware Horizon VDI solution

Bishop Auckland College achieves massive performance gains with VDI

Bishop Auckland College, a further education college in the North East of England, needed to replace aging PCs at its Newton Aycliffe campus and expand access to high-performance machines for more than 200 students studying engineering and construction. With only 25 workstations able to run demanding CAD and 3D applications such as AutoCAD, the college turned to Phoenix Software and its VMware Horizon VDI expertise to find a more cost-effective way to scale.

Phoenix Software designed a custom VMware Horizon VDI solution on Dell PowerEdge R730 servers with VMware vSAN, Intel P3600 SSD storage, and NVIDIA Kepler-based GRID GPUs. The result quadrupled the number of high-performance workstations, enabled over 100 students to run AutoCAD and other 3D apps simultaneously from any device and even from home, and delivered up to 20x faster performance than the college’s previous best standalone workstations.

Bishop Auckland College

Wayne Longton-Worley

Head of IT Services