Siemens Lift-and-shift to Rescale is here, and in force
Substantial additions to Siemens SaaS on Rescale
Siemens has teamed up with Rescale to expand their SaaS offering in the cloud, bringing distinct advantages to both large enterprises and smaller organizations. In this blog post we’ll look at the details of this program and the benefits provided.
Substantial price decreases have arrived
First, let’s look at what has changed in the SaaS offering on Rescale. For years, customers of Rescale and Siemens have been able to purchase on-demand licenses for batch solving of Simcenter Nastran and Simcenter 3D products. Those products are still offered, but the price has been reduced by up to 60%! That’s not all: Simcenter Amesim is now also available for batch solving on Rescale with the same parallel solve pricing that comes with Simcenter Nastran and Simcenter 3D. This is absolutely great news for Rescale users, and I’ll get into a bit later.
GUI now available on subscription
In addition to expanding the batch solve offering on Rescale, we are excited to offer a SaaS option for GUI usage as well. GUIs, or Graphic User Interfaces, are used to interact with your model for pre-processing activities prior to solve as well as post-processing activities following the solve. This required a user to purchase or lease a license from Siemens directly. With the new SaaS offering, Rescale offers a monthly concurrent GUI subscription service for anyone looking to access Simcenter 3D or Simcenter Amesim pre and post-processing tools. Each GUI offers three different subscription levels; Basic, Advanced, and Premium; to allow users to only pay for what they need. Customers can select which GUI level they need, for how many months, and for how many concurrent users.
The expansion of the Rescale batch solve offering along with the introduction of GUI subscriptions allows users to easily expand every aspect of their Simcenter 3D or 1D environment while also allowing customers to run fully zero-footprint when needed, meaning no local software or hardware resources are required. This provides the ultimate in portability and flexibility.
Example use case for the enterprise: from weeks to hours
Now let’s look at some use cases for two customers at opposite ends of the spectrum: The large enterprise user and the small startup.
First, the large enterprise user. This customer likely already owns licenses for many Siemens products and uses them on a daily basis. Sound familiar? But, those licenses are purchased on an annual basis and there will be times when more analysis capability is needed. This demand could result from a lack of hardware resources, a lack of software licenses, or both. Let’s assume this enterprise customer has entered a part of their product development process where they need to run a large number of Simcenter Nastran analysis in order to determine the best design path to take.
The analyst team has several design options they are considering and needs to test multiple load cases against those options using Simcenter Nastran. For this example, let’s say they have 3 different design options and they need to test each them against 25 different load cases. If every load case takes 5 hours to process and they only have 1 Simcenter license they will have all results back in 375 hours. That is over 15 days of continuous analysis processing, during which time their local resources are not usable for anything else and their annual license is fully tied up. However, if this same situation is moved to Rescale, not only can all three jobs can be run simultaneously, but all load cases can also be run in parallel. This means the results for this simulation can be returned to the analysis team in just over 5 hours.
The licensing cost for this run, assuming the requirements are satisfied by a Simcenter Nastran Basic license, would be $275.25. This figure does not include the charges for the Rescale hardware to run the application, but if we assume the customer was running each solve using 8 cores the hardware cost would be roughly the same as the software cost at around $275-$300 total. Spending less than $600 to free up a license, the hardware, and the engineer’s time as well as deliver a result in 5 hour instead of 15 days is an incredible advantage.
Example use case for the startup: extreme cost optimization
Next, let’s take a look at the smaller company. This company doesn’t have as intense of a design cycle and may only occasionally need high level design analysis. Due to this, this company has not invested in simulation software. As a result, they are seeing increased failures and warranty claims in the field, but not enough to justify the cost of an annual license.
Instead, this customer could subscribe to a Simcenter 3D GUI to perform their model pre/post activities in the cloud and use the same batch solve techniques as the the large enterprise customer (above) to get results even faster. Instead of having to invest in an annual licenses or short-term lease, the customer can subscribe to the Simcenter 3D GUI for between around $590-$1,764 per user, per month, depending on the capability level required for their simulation.
Rescale offers a wide range of desktop capabilities to serve this usage, including GPU accelerated desktops. The user selects the desktop they need for the task at hand and only pays for the time they use it, down to the second. Standard desktops start at $1* per hour and GPU enabled desktops start at $3 per hour. This allows the smaller company that only has occasional usage needs to deliver the same results as the large enterprise.
They are able to do so at a fraction of the cost because they only need the software for small time periods and not as frequently as the enterprise user. If the smaller company’s usage increased they may want to speak with their Siemens representative about purchasing a perpetual or lease license and augmenting with Rescale SaaS licenses.
Siemens and Rescale: a partnership where customers win
The new Siemens SaaS offering available on Rescale offers customers the ability to augment their current solve capability and/or enter the market at a very reasonable price with all the capabilities needed to ensure the best possible results.
*Note: pricing current as of November 2019 and is subject to change
