Many system builders have never sold one and couldn't define what a workstation is if they had to. Odder yet, many vendors are hard-pressed to differentiate a workstation from a desktop. Many think that workstations are synonymous with inexpensive data entry boxes used in cubicle farms when in fact most workstations are moderate to high-end graphics machines.

Top Software Investments for 2005 Within the FX/dynamic media market, you see a clear snapshot of how workstations are being used. (Source: TrendWatch)

You would think that workstations would be just as integral to white box operations as desktops and servers. After all, practically everything manmade, from shoes to skyscrapers to nanoscale genetic structures, is now designed on a workstation system. Every movie and TV show you see depends on workstations for production. Schools, government offices, printing shops, and designers all use workstations. The key is that workstations are visualization machines, and the data they render are so massive and complex that special hardware and software are required to do the job effectively.

But there's a little more to it than that. A Pentium Extreme Edition with the latest graphics card and gobs of memory can crunch graphics like mad, but few would call such a configuration a workstation. The missing ingredient is optimization for a professional user or market. If you can figure out how to fine-tune such optimizations for your existing client base, you've got a whole new avenue available for high-end hardware sales and service contracts. Better yet, because workstations tend to thrive best in vertical niches, building a small base of workstation business among your current roster is a great way to work into expanded sales within those verticals as your expertise deepens.

Defining Workstations

Somehow, in some way, a workstation has added value in it optimized for professional-class, real-time visualization or, in the case of digital audio workstations, encoding. Quite often, workstations are designed and used for a single application, although white box workstations tend to flourish better in multi-application settings.

Workstation Building Blocks Workstations generally feature beefier cases with larger power supplies and better cooling, multi-processor configurations, ECC memory, and other high-end components.

Examples of why workstations are necessary are in no short supply. Even in my own test lab, a 3.73 GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition running a 256MB Radeon X850XT and 1GB of lowest latency OCZ DDR2 shows 100% CPU utilization on the primary thread and over 50% utilization on the second thread when encoding ripped DVD VOB files to DivX format, and a moderate-sized job can tie that processor up for hours. In fact, I did this operation just recently with the as-yet-unreleased DivX 6 Converter and crashed the application twice. As a consumer fiddling around with his video collection, such things don't matter. But when you're a sub-contractor with a video production project on deadline and thousands of dollars at stake, you need hardware that is optimized for the job and absolutely guaranteed not to crash.

The Tier-One Alternative Some clients will insist on name brand workstations, and HP's xw9300 is a hot choice for geologic modeling and similar visualization applications. (Screen images by Paradigm.)

"A workstation," says Thor Sewell, workstation marketing manager for Intel, "is a system that has been optimized to meet customer requirements across many different verticals: manufacturing, digital content creation, energy, and so forth. They offer the highest performance, have the highest capabilities from a memory, storage, and I/O perspective, and they're certified with specific software applications demanded by the higher end of the market."

Certification is typically seen as an essential ingredient in the workstation market. Since the application is the most important part of workstation usage, it generally falls to ISVs to build certification programs aimed at guaranteeing compatibility with a hardware component or an entire system. Certification by a major ISV is usually accepted as gospel by system builders and customers, but some choose to question the matter. I've spoken with some workstation clients who distrust certifications because of the marketing dollars tossed around by hardware manufacturers behind the scenes. Such customers prefer more first-hand QA work.

BOXX Technologies is a prominent builder of white box workstations, reputed to own about 4% of the total U.S. workstation market. Director of sales Ed Caracappa notes that certification is essential in its product offerings but still only half of the quality assurance battle.

"Everything we do here from the design of our chasses to the integration of off-the-shelf and top-shelf components is built around both having our systems certified by the software vendors in our marketplace, people like Alias and Autodesk and Softimage. And on top of the certification these ISVs do, we do our own internal validation. That can take anywhere from two weeks to two months, and it's just to make sure that we have the highest level of confidence that, no matter the configuration or the number of dollars spent, you're going to get the best possible performance out of that machine."

Certified and Stable AutoCAD has been a leading workstation title in engineering and architecture for many years, and Autodesk maintains a rigorous certification program for the application.

Some resellers and customers may be disconcerted to find that a given workstation component may cost twice as much as a desktop-class counterpart yet not perform as fast in a benchmarking environment. Occasionally, some workstation customers demand the highest possible performance, but workstation users tend to care more about stability and reliability than absolute speed. The primary gap between workstation and desktop platforms centers on hardware. ECC vs. non-ECC memory, dual- and multi-processor Xeon and Opteron processors rather than Pentium 4 and Athlon 64, and graphics are often the largest differentiator.

ECC DRAM in particular is a perfect example of the difference between a desktop and a workstation. ECC is not available in the high speed/low latency configurations that are now all the rage from companies such as OCZ and Corsair. In the DDR world, about the fastest modules are OCZ's PC-3200 ECC Registered Performance Series—a far cry from the PC-4800 Platinum Series marketed to high-end consumers. In part, this is because a gamer doesn't care about reliability. The worst thing that might to happen to him is a blip of bad data in the middle of a game that disappears on the next frame, or, in the worst case, a system crash. But barring an unusually great score, he'll get over the loss. In a professional's case, losing a few lines of data in the middle of a project could be catastrophic. Consider the implications of a corrupt computation when building a 100-storey high-rise or an air-to-ground missile. Workstation users are far more likely to sacrifice some performance to get greater reliability.

When Error Correction Matters ECC-enabled memory, such as these 400 MHz registered DDR modules from OCZ, are a must when ensuring data integrity in workstation projects.

It's worth noting that a low-end workstation may be identical to a desktop PC in terms of hardware. Dell offers workstations for $650. The only things that make such a machine a "workstation" are the certifications tied to it saying that the box is totally compatible with this or that application. This also denotes a radical departure in the workstation market from a decade ago when proprietary designs from the likes of Sun, SGI, and HP ruled. Today, proprietary workstations are being increasingly shoved toward the high end of the market while "PC-based" designs dominate the low- and mid-ranges, typically anything under $5,000.

"[Defining a workstation versus a desktop] comes down to the customer's ROI," writes senior technical analyst Alex Hererra with Jon Peddie Research in his March 2005 JPR Workstation Report. "In exchange for the premium a workstation supplier charges, the product and/or vendor must offer something of value to the professional user that can't be found otherwise. What separates a workstation from other machines is defined by what the professional user demands and the premium that user is willing to pay to satisfy those demands, for example, added features or higher performance metrics that the bulk of the consumer and corporate IT users would sacrifice for lower cost. Even low-end PC-Derived Workstations comprised of virtually identical core components as their corporate/consumer brethren must offer something more to the professional user, something more than just the label ‘workstation' on the enclosure. That ‘something more' must be perceived to provide lower risk or greater financial return through increased productivity, some value returned in exchange for the premium charged. The more critical that application is, and the more other costs associated with running that application (e.g., man-hours), the bigger the premium the buyer will pay."

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