Challenges of an on-premises environment

Peak-capacity planning – On-premises environment setup requires an upfront capital investment. Your IT teams must plan for the compute and storage resources for all phases of the project. Depending on the nature of the project, this is not a small task. Your project team might reach maximum capacity, which can impact productivity or leave hardware resources unused. Both cases could impact your project schedule and costs.

Continuous upgrades – As your project progresses, the simulation and verification tasks become more complex and consume more resources. The CAD and IT teams must constantly upgrade the infrastructure to handle the workload. Planning these upgrades is more difficult if multiple teams share the infrastructure and have competing deadlines. Typically, even well-planned hardware upgrades are time consuming and cause disruptions to design teams.

Reliability and uptime – Reliability is a major concern with an on-premises CAD infrastructure system. One of the biggest concerns for any data center is server uptime If the CAD system goes down, the loss of productivity could significantly increase engineering costs. Depending on your tracking method, tracking and calculating 100% uptime can be imprecise.

High-availability and disaster recovery – Server farms, which were previously maintained at each design center, are often consolidated into a limited number of data centers. For example, if your company has 20 design centers across America and Europe, you might consolidate all their servers into four data centers, geographically distributed across the two continents. Maintaining the high-availability of data centers is challenging and often depends on the reliability of external factors. In addition, IT teams need a well-curated plan for disaster recovery for server farms.