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The primary reason that design departments are usually isolated on their own network is speed. Unlike regular documents such as reports and spreadsheets, graphical, audio, and engineering documents are significantly larger. A large Excel spreadsheet may be 25 megabytes. A large AVI capture from video could be 5 to 7 gigabytes (where 1 gigabyte = 1000 megabytes).
 Certain direct video editing applications, such as Premiere and Avid, need to locally store the video files when working within the project. These applications typically require a builitin storage solution directly attached to the workstation to cache the large working files. Actually publishing or rendering these files back to the server requires gigabit networks for the designer to finish his/her projects on time.
 In additions to the actual workstations involved, the disaster recovery strategies for graphic departments is generally arranged much differently that conventional lines of business. Due to the huge files sizes of many of the files in use, a disk-disk strategy is the most cost effective method, as backing up terabytes of video data to tape can be monumentally expensive.
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Check out our workstation specials below:.
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The Right Tool for the Right Job
In the eyes of many small and medium business owners, workstations are workstations. Many consider the PC a simple machine that can be a word processor, run some spreadsheets, and access the internet. Those that work in the design and video industry know that there the physical demands on a workstation are three to four times higher on a design workstation as compared to a business PC. In addition to needing the CPU horsepower to run the calculations inv loved in shading and graphical transformations, design workstations also need two to three times as much RAM for speedy texturing and layer performance. The additional video and audio capture peripherals for such workstation require much more flexibility in the the type of hardware used.
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A design workstation, whether used for audio, video, CAD/CAM, or blueprinting, is a much different animal when comparing to a conventional PC. The special hardware used by many capture devices require the computer to be able to parse information very quickly in order to capture video without error as well as render graphics in a reasonable amount of time.
Storage for these workstation is typically its own subsystem. Applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Premiere require their own scratch disks to run independently of the operating system and storage for projects. Networking graphic departments truly require their own dedicated gigabit LAN in order to work effectively and efficiently in addition to their workstation specs, as the bottleneck of all projects is typically on another server on the network.
The good news is that hardware has become and less and less expensive over time and it is now significantly cheaper to build dynamic workstations than ever before. The proliferation of multiple core processors and high bandwidth RAM has made it possible to use high-end home PCs as video and CAD workstations.
Are you looking to provision a design workstation or department? Contact our technical consultation team to discuss what's best for your home or business.
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