Digital workspaces

Production workspaces built for demanding creative work.

Secure access to physical workstations and virtual desktops, with GPU acceleration planned around production workloads.

ALT VFX

The constraint

Artists need responsive applications, dependable graphics performance and access to production data wherever they work. The studio also needs to maintain that environment without disrupting active projects. Remote access, desktop delivery and compute capacity have to work together.

Our work

Quokka worked across ALT VFX’s digital workspace environment and production compute architecture. We refreshed Horizon and the access path to production workstations, staged the endpoint migration and completed the operating handover. The wider architecture work considered virtual desktops and NVIDIA vGPU to match hardware acceleration to the workload.

Design the workspace around the creative workload.

Artists & production teamsIn the studio or working remotely

Secure workspace accessIdentity · MFA · session brokering

Physical workstationsDedicated graphics hardware · PCoIP / Blast

Virtual desktops · VDIHardware acceleration through vGPU

Production applications and project dataSize compute, graphics, memory and storage for the work. Validate the artist’s session as well as the access controls.

Workspace architecture: physical workstations and VDI are parallel delivery options. The completed Horizon refresh and the vGPU architecture recommendations are distinct pieces of work.

What changed

Design around the production session

Consider application responsiveness, image quality, graphics capacity and data access together. Cover both physical workstations and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Modernise without interrupting active work

Build the replacement Horizon environment alongside the existing service. Coordinate gateway, identity and endpoint changes around production sessions and the network migration.

Make it supportable

Check authentication, connectivity and session performance before cutover. Hand over the configuration and operating documentation to the studio’s support team.

The result

The completed refresh gives artists a current, supported access path to their production workstations. Quokka’s architecture recommendations also set out how virtualised workloads and GPU acceleration can support changing production needs. The work connects the artist experience to an environment the studio can maintain.

Physical production workstation access refreshed

Duo MFA integrated at the external access gateway

Staged endpoint migration and operating handover

Workspace assessment, design and delivery by Quokka Advisory for ALT VFX.

Inside the delivery

The engineering decisions.

The access refresh and the compute architecture address different parts of the same production environment.

Physical workstations and virtual desktops

Horizon provides the session-brokering and access layer. Physical workstations retain dedicated graphics hardware; virtual desktops provide another way to deliver a production workspace. Their sizing and display configuration must follow the applications and the artist’s experience.

Hardware acceleration matched to the workload

The production compute recommendations include NVIDIA vGPU for sharing GPU hardware across virtual machines, and dedicated GPU pass-through where a workload needs it. This is architecture and capacity-planning work; the records reviewed do not establish a completed vGPU rollout.

A staged transition through the whole session path

The completed Horizon refresh joined gateway access, Duo MFA, certificates, workstation agents and HP/Teradici components. Endpoint updates and network changes were staged around active production sessions, with checks from sign-in through to a usable workspace.

Operations considered in the design

Documentation and knowledge transfer covered the environment the support team would maintain. The wider compute design considered workload profiles and the relationship between graphics, memory, network and storage performance, so future capacity choices can follow production requirements.

What needs to work better?

Talk to us about the environment, the constraint and the change.

Talk to Quokka