Lighting Up The Workstation Market
our years ago, 120 Gbytes on the desktop was pushing the upper limit of desktop storage, 1.5GHz was blazing fast and a $5,000 workstation was a niche product.
Fast forward to 2005: Rapidly advancing hardware and software have expanded the market for advanced desktops and workstations and turned it into a margin-rich, bread-and-butter category for many custom-system builders. Workstation unit volume jumped 45 percent last year over 2003 for a select group of 50 higher-volume system builders in the CRN Fast Growth System Builder Survey, outpacing both notebooks and servers, and accounted for about 7 percent of the group’s volume.
With their ability to configure systems for a variety of applications—from speciality gaming machines to medical imaging, to media production to a variety of engineering and scientific applications—custom-system builders are in a position to exploit the still-accelerating pace of change in PC technology.
“Clearly the components, the hardware, have come a long way,” said Randy Copeland, who founded Velocity Micro, Richmond, Va., in 1992 to focus on the gaming and workstation market. “The pace continues to climb very rapidly.”
Now Copeland is expecting the 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows to further turbocharge the workstation space, despite early nay-saying by critics. Velocity Micro can now build workstations with 8 Gbytes of RAM dedicated specifically to the operating system. “There are many programs that can utilize that,” he said. “One day of rendering a frame in ‘Star Wars’ [today] might have taken 11 days before.”
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Not only is the performance greater, but the unit cost of installing Windows XP Professional x64 Edition into a workstation is far less—sometimes thousands of dollars less—than running Windows 2003 Advanced Server for similar applications. “We can provide a $5,000 workstation that blows the doors off an $8,000 workstation that’s six or eight months old from one of the larger OEMs,” Copeland said. “We can take our size and really leverage the latest technology.”
It isn’t just Microsoft’s Windows XP Professional x64 Edition that promises to expand the market. System builders now find themselves with access to technology that a year ago appeared out of reach: Dual-core processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Intel offer twice the compute capacity in the same footprint as a single-core processor. Faster, larger drives continue to push the envelope, with vendors promising half-Tbyte drives in the near future. And advanced graphics processors from ATI, Matrox and Nvidia are taking advantage of expanding memory capacities in components.
In the beginning, Velocity Micro focused on the gaming machines, a market that has been hot for a number of speciality system builders. It is now parlaying that into other engineering workstations and different areas. Many of Velocity Micro’s high-performance systems are built with overclocked video cards and other gaming-like features, which Copeland said are constructed without sacrificing stability. “A lot of it does come back to our gaming heritage,” he said. “Now we’re turning those tricks into the CAD workstation space.”
That pace of change has allowed Velocity Micro into accounts that once passed over large swaths of the channel. Copeland’s company recently won a bid to supply high-performance workstations to a Fortune 50 tobacco company’s research facilities. The company’s labs were collecting reams of data on about 250,000 spectra, or blasts of light, per hour, and needed the data stored locally for quick mining. To handle the job, Velocity Micro equipped workstations with dual AMD Opteron Model 250 processors and two 400-Gbyte Hitachi 7200- rpm hard drives.
Custom-system builders are not only benefiting from the wider variety and lower cost of advanced workstation components, but also from their ability to enable customers to configure systems the way they want. Aberdeen, a system builder in Santa Fe Springs, Calif., enables customers to log on to its Web site and order, for example, a system with an Intel Xeon 3.2GHz processor, 533MHz front-side bus, 2 Mbytes of cache, a 300-Gbyte Seagate hard drive and Red Hat Linux Workstation professional operating system, among other components, at a price of $15,810.
Such online configurators are not for the faint of heart and require system builders that can offer a great deal of technical support. “Where we run into problems is when a customer starts a sentence with, ‘I couldn’t find this on your configurator, but I’ve added …’ ” said Jock Tateel, vice president of sales. If Aberdeen hasn’t tested it to make sure it works in an integrated workstation, he said, chances are it’s not going to work. “It’s a matter of our technical people staying on top of what works with what,” Tateel said.
Higher-performing chips, 64-bit software and bigger drives aren’t just enabling more creativity on the desktop. Ace Computer, an Arlington Heights, Ill.-based system builder, has rolled many higher-end features into mobile workstations that are being used by U.S. Department of Defense personnel in Iraq.
John Samborski, vice president of Ace, said his company’s Raptor line of mobile workstations benefit from advanced cooling technologies—including heat sinks and more power-efficient configurations—that were once used to boost the overclocking and speed requirements of gamers. “The cooling on them is so good, you can run them in Iraq,” Samborski said. “In 130 degrees in the shade, they can handle it. They don’t overheat.”
Samborski’s company is building workstations based on both AMD and Intel processors, including the AMD Athlon FX processor and Intel’s 64-bit-capable Pentium 600 Series, which then makes 64-bit Windows available in a mobile solution. Some Raptor configurations come with two-display capability, letting the system support two monitors for enhanced productivity.
As in the gaming market, custom-system builders can also benefit from the “cool” factor in business markets. Copeland said one client recently asked for a $1,000 custom-paint job on a top-of-the-line workstation. That pushed the total cost of the system to more than $17,000, but the customer wanted people to know it was using a serious system to do serious work, he said.
Workstations are becoming a hot market, where custom is cool and opportunity rife for creative system builders.
