Modefachschule Sigmaringen – Digital Workplace

Challenge

Until now, the Sigmaringen Fashion School had to regularly invest in powerful CAD workstations so that students could work with sophisticated applications from the fields of graphic design, CAD construction and 3D simulation in the existing technology rooms. Driven by the desire for continuous improvement and the experience gained from the pandemic, the aim was to implement a location-independent digital working environment for students and faculty. An important prerequisite was a central operation in a German computer center and thus the fulfillment of the data protection legal requirements in educational operations.

Solution

Our consultants dealt intensively with the operational workflows and built up a corresponding requirements list based on the findings and wishes. On the basis of all compiled information, the Sysfacts team developed a decision template for the responsible persons and accompanied the selection process.

After the setup of the environment transformation project, Sysfacts technicians implemented the solution including optimization and benchmarking of the special applications. The final handover to school operations took place during a four-week hypercare phase to catch any problems early.

At the request of the customer, the operational responsibility for the infrastructure lies with Sysfacts AG. Since the Sigmaringen Fashion School places the highest value on an optimal user experience, the internal IT staff is primarily concerned with Level 1 requests and serves as a link between the Sysfacts technical teams and the school management. The overall environment is operated via the FRA15 data center as an advanced hosting solution from Sysfacts AG, with the system connected to the school center in Sigmaringen via redundant dedicated lines.

Lessons learned

The many specialist applications from the field of fashion and design sometimes have very specific infrastructure requirements. The use of modern NVIDIA GPUs and vGPU technology was unavoidable for this reason.

Due to the independence of the user’s location, completely new teaching concepts can now be realized on the basis of the new 3D-capable VDI environment. Students and teachers can work independently of end device and location.