On behalf of Kay Freund, IBM NA Ecosystem Marketing, kfreund@us.ibm.com

Participating in the 3DEXPERIENCE Partner Forum (#3DXforum) in early July 2014 in Paris, I saw impressive new 3D EXPERIENCEs.  What great progress, making possible another set of business-level innovations that will require a very robust computing infrastructure to assure user interactivity.  This reinforced the importance of our IBM initiatives with Dassault Systemes to make sure that the necessary infrastructure will be there for V6 and 3DEXPERIENCE solutions!  IBM provides infrastructure of servers, storage and software, listed in the Dassault Systèmes supported operating environment, which can help you get started quickly and scale as your usage needs.

Why does it matter?  This infrastructure can reduce the Total Cost of Acquisition (TCA) for Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE V6 with ENOVIA, V5 with ENOVIA or SIMULIA Abaqus software.     Let’s look at several examples:

Just there, the infrastructure for COE V6 Discovery Project

The COE V6 Discovery project helped a number of companies’ users to discover directly how to best get started with V6.   To allow this discovery, they used the IBM smarter infrastructure of POWER7 server with DB2 and WAS.  These smarter systems are tuned to improve the performance and efficiency of the Dassault Systèmes portfolio and reduce costs by using out of the box virtualization to improve resource usage, manage risk and speed implementation so that the users can focus on their “V6 discovery”.  We knew that we could just run the COE V6 Discovery project because similar systems are virtualized to support many customers’ development, test and production environments of V6 and/or V5.  POWER8 is available.

When should you decide to use DB2 and POWER for ENOVIA?

Each V6 implementation requires a relational database so just consider DB2 when lower cost and higher performance matter. DB2 advantages include lower total cost of acquisition, lower database maintenance costs, especially when virtualization and sub-capacity licensing are used, lower staff workloads and increase scalability.  In one way, I “just” need to pick one of the supported relational data base.  However, as I look at budget, I become motivated to see license and operational savings considerations.  Specifically, DB2 uses less memory, storage and computing time from adaptive compression and faster index performance. Reduced administration is because of DB2 automatic maintenance, storage optimization, faster backup, self-tuning and self healing. DB2 has better scale-out efficiency, superior system reliability and faster set up for high availability. Because ENOVIA is compute intensive and many customers have multiple environments (i.e. development, test, production), DB2 is needed on a subset of the cores so DB2 sub-capacity licensing can significantly reduce total cost of acquisition (TCA) compared to Oracle.  See the article with embedded videos here.

Starting and scaling with 3D simulation

Does it matter for the specialty simulation apps?   Oh yeah!  That’s why we did the IBM Application Ready Solution for Abaqus, a powerful technical computing solution that simplifies and accelerates the simulation environment. This solution, developed in partnership with Dassault Systèmes, provides the system, storage and pre-integrated cluster workload and High Performance Computing (HPC) cloud management software components. This solution helps you quickly and easily deploy, run, and manage a high performance Abaqus computing environment for simulation processes including pre-processing, solving, and post-processing.  See more here.

Like the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, the infrastructure is consistently innovating.  I hope the market opportunity will continue to bring these innovations together going forward!

• Transforming your industry requires a cloud provider who has done the same.  See www.softlayer.com .
• POWER8 and the OpenPower Foundation break open the innovation walls, including a partnership with NVIDIA.  POWER8 provides high level of performance, security and reliability with AIX exploiting decades of IBM technology innovation.  POWER8 processor and architecture handles bigger data demands in the cloud — delivering faster insights and an expanded Linux-based open server ecosystem.  See the IBM POWER8 announcement here and the OpenPower Foundation here.