As power users increasingly adopt a hybrid work environment, many are discovering that they must choose between having either a high-performance workstation or an underpowered portable computer that is easy to move between office, home or the local coffee shop. This article discusses the traditional tradeoffs power users have made between performance and flexibility and suggests factors to evaluate when looking for high-performance mobile solutions.
As organizations emerge from the pandemic, many are facing the new reality of the hybrid workplace. While some employees are anxious to return to the workplace, most workers—including power users—are happy to occasionally work from home, the coffee shop or anywhere else. As hybrid work takes its foothold, one of the biggest issues for power users is the tradeoff between the powerful workstation at the office and the relatively underpowered remote or work-from-home computing environment.
One major problem is that although traditional remote solutions such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and cloud are available, they can throttle compute-intensive applications and slow workflows to the frustration of power users, regardless of where they work from. The reliability of their high-performance workstations is one of the big reasons why these users may prefer to return to the office.
VDI workflows are often designed for large teams and rely on shared corporate resources such as storage and databases, but VDI typically doesn’t offer power users access to workstation-class performance. This can introduce latency and complexity for a variety of use cases, whether engineering, creative or data science.
As for cloud options, although more than viable for a broad range of business applications, power users may find that spinning up new instances or allocating storage pools isn’t as “instant” as advertised. And if large amounts of data are being moved—whether media, product designs or data science repositories—the overhead costs associated with storing and moving data to and from the cloud can rapidly escalate out of control.
For power user demands, there are several approaches to delivering required resources in a hybrid work environment. Let’s look at two of them.
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Some organizations may prefer to bring all their high-performance computing resources to a central location and serve up dedicated workstation performance to power users in a remote fashion, whether the user is working on or off site. For example, the HP ZCentral solution offers a centralized hardware and software stack that delivers remote performance that rivals the on-premises experience while reducing the IT burden by centralizing workstation performance, access, security and management.
Whichever approach works best for your organization, Z by HP offers a broad range of solutions, including workstations, displays and peripherals to satisfy even the most demanding power users.
Learn more here.
