Over the years, we have teamed up with many Architects and other AEC firms. Because of our specialisation in these industries, we do continuous research into the best solutions to suit the technical complexities and challenges they face. We have looked into Inevidesk several times. Here is our take on the solution.
So, what is Inevidesk in layman’s terms?
Have you heard the term ‘virtual desktop’ or used it, or a form of it, to work on a computer remotely? This is where you use a full Windows environment running on another machine. Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix, TeamViewer, Splashtop, and others offer a similar sort of experience. The idea is that you use a relatively simple local machine to access another’s resources. You do all the data access and processing elsewhere.
Inevidesk gives you ‘pods’ of computing power, which are essentially servers in a datacentre that you remote into and run a virtual Windows environment. Each pod is a dedicated machine that can service 7 people in ‘vdesks’. There are mid-spec, high-spec, or rendering pods. Each vdesk is assigned dedicated resources from the host machine.
What we like
Inevidesk is specifically designed with Architects and Engineers in mind. We know of no other virtual desktop solution that does this. There is no equivalent in something like AVD (Azure Virtual Desktops), and the nearest thing is horribly expensive.
The solution neatly ring-fences all your processing and data into one environment that can be accessed from any device that can open up a remote connection, even tablets and mobiles.
It is also very scalable. You can add pods as your needs grow. You can even go for their Flexidesk service on monthly subscriptions and add and remove vdesks as much as is needed.
What we don’t like
The problem is that age-old issue; if your people aren’t where your data is, you must somehow get to it. You also have to see what is happening and do all the number-crunching elsewhere.
Inevidesk tries to tackle this issue with some impressive kit, but this kit is still a shared resource. This will never be as impressive as a local shared resource; let alone the usual dedicated resource a local desktop of similar spec will bring.
Each pod for up to 7 people has to be purchased, serviced and hosted. There are considerable costs in this solution before any extras such as storage, extra processing, or RAM are added on:
- Each mid-spec or high-spec pod is £9,974 or £16,565 capital outlay for three years.
- Each pod has an annual service fee of £1,720.
- Each mid-spec or high-spec pod’s hosting is £165 or £230 per month.
- Every person needs virtualisation access rights licensing in the form of MS 365 E3 / E5 / Business Premium or other.
This means for every pod for 7 people, you will be paying either:
- £21,074 for a mid-spec pod or £30,005 for a high-spec pod.
- + MS 365 licensing.
- + storage at £75 per TB per month.
…over three years. That is a significant amount of cash.
We are also aware of some eye-watering implementation costs being charged to get the solution in place.
Inevidesk says a pod can be run for as long as required but comes with a 3-year warranty. We do not know if this warranty can be extended. It will almost certainly be impossible/implausible beyond 5 years, and we suspect there will be no guarantees and a hard sell at 3.
Our conclusion
Remote access to data is a tough nut to crack, especially for AEC companies, with their vast amounts of data and complex project management and data compliance needs. This is why so many have found the move away from traditional client-server environments so hard or are still with them.
Nothing beats a powerful local machine if you are doing complex CAD work or anything requiring heavy GPU usage. Whilst Inevidesk has a good go at tackling this with the high-spec pods, it simply cannot get close to what can be achieved locally. The mid-spec pods are okay but cannot be used for any intensive CAD work, and you can forget about any rendering on these or the high-spec ones (they do have a rendering pod, but this is for two vdesks, so over triple the price).
Out of roughly seven different options available to you, this is the second most expensive. We don’t think this is money well spent. Buying a server for seven people every three years is slightly crazy. You are far better off with powerful local machines and a way to work on them with a drive mapping, just like a server, and blisteringly fast local processing, GPU, and data access.
We have another suggestion. See the bottom of our Cloud Data Platform page for a graphic showing where this sits and a webinar we did a few years back on this subject. We spent over three years researching the available options and can give you far more advice than this article.
Why not drop us a line and pick our brains (no strings – unless you want them)?
