Toyota Motor has chosen Nutanix to create VDI

2021: Implementation of VDI on the Nutanix platform

On July 22, 2021, Nutanix announced that Toyota Motor Corp, using the Nutanix platform, deployed a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for the engineering design team. It is used to remotely work with automated 3D design (3D CAD) tools.

Toyota, an automaker with 360,000 employees (data for July 2021), in 2016 announced a commitment to reforming office work, presenting a home work program for about 13,000 employees. However, the level of acceptance of changes varied between departments. For example, the engineering team was unable to use the new model. Employees had to work with design projects using 3D CAD on workstations in the office. In addition, the Department of Digital Transformation has faced difficulties associated with the high costs of acquiring and maintaining such workstations.

To "increase transmission" and solve this problem, TOYOTA decided to use hyperconvergent infrastructure (HCI) to create a VDI environment that allows you to use high-performance applications and run 3D CAD software. The Nutanix cloud platform features virtual GPU (vGPU) support for rendering 3D graphics in virtual environments. In addition, the flexibility and scalability of Nutanix have become important factors that have helped to quickly respond to changes in business requirements.

Using the Nutanix platform, a VDI environment has been created for about 1000 devices. Virtual desktops were able to deploy and run much faster than TOYOTA originally planned. The engineering team noted that this allowed them to move to this way of working. This opportunity was especially important when they were forced to work from home due to the restrictions associated with COVID-19. As a result, design work was carried out without stops.

In the future, we plan to deploy similar systems not only for Toyota Motor, but also for other companies of the Toyota group, "says Masanobu Takahisa from the Department of Digital Transformation. - In the future, we also hope to provide CAE software for engineering calculations in the VDI environment and thus continue to reform the organization of the engineering design team.

In addition to expanding the available ways of working, the use of Nutanix allowed Toyota to consolidate shared and underutilized workstations in the VDI environment in order to reduce their number by about half. This has significantly reduced costs.