Huisman

Case study | Huisman Equipment
Challenge
Critical engineering, worldwide
Huisman Equipment is a design
engineering rm based in the Netherlands
with operations worldwide. Formed in
1929, it specialises in the manufacture
of heavy construction equipment for
o shore oil and gas companies.
The company’s production has grown
increasingly global. In addition to oces
in the Netherlands, it now has production
facilities in the Czech Republic and China,
and will open a factory in Brazil in 2014.
As production has grown, so too has the scale
and scope of the design output. Unfortunately
much of the hardware had not kept pace with
this growth. The design teams were having to
work with outdated machines, making support
and software updates dicult. There was no
consistency to the hardware experience.
“The result was that the computers were
constantly freezing,” says Andre Faber,
global manager of IT infrastructure,
Huisman Equipment. “Designers either
couldn’t open a le, or worse, a ‘blue screen
of death’ appears. Engineers couldn’t work
for hours until the problems were xed.”
With the company growing, and designs
becoming more complex, the design teams
needed to view, create and amend les
immediately. “We needed to standardise
our workstations,” says Faber, “and we
wanted to work with one supplier.
It’s important we have a hardware partner
capable of working with us into the future.”
Solution
Workstation performance with
software compatibility
Faber discussed the issue with a local IT
service provider, H&R Automatisering.
Its advice was to consider HP workstations,
taking the Z400 Series for standard users
and the higher-spec Z800 Series for those
working on requiring more advanced
functionalities. Both would be able to support
3D modelling software and video cards,
vital features for the Huisman designers.
This was followed by a session at the
HP demo lab.
“It was very important that these machines
work smoothly with Autodesk and ANSYS
software – both provide critical modelling
software for designers,” says Faber.
“HP has a great relationship with both.
HP has customised and certied its
workstations to suit, which means a lot to us.”
With the decision made to go with
HP workstations, Huisman ordered
550 workstations, 550 laptops and 550
desktops, a mix of Z420 and Z820 machines.
The Z420 machines come with 32GB RAM,
Quadro 4000, SAS 15k disk and liquid
cooling; the Z820s come with a Dual
Processor to deal with heavier workloads.
“HP is now standard anywhere we need
computing power,” says Faber.
2