Product descriptions on a website are often helpful, but it takes a real-life application to truly experience technical products like our KVM devices. This can be difficult without the ability to showcase them at trade shows. Of course, we also want to give our customers and anyone interested in KVM the opportunity to experience our devices live, despite the pandemic and social distance. So the idea of building a showroom was an obvious one.
Our plan was to create a space where we would not just display our equipment. While our units come in high quality cases, they still lack certain model qualities. Although their design gives an initial impression of quality, it is not until you hold them in your hands that you really appreciate their solid construction. Instead of just building a room to showcase our KVM equipment in shiny cabinets, we wanted to create a control room where we could display the most diverse scenarios from the most diverse industries based on real customer applications. This was the inspiration for our new ControlCenter-Xperience showroom, which opened its virtual doors in early October 2021.
ControlCenter-Xperience – one room for all applications
- Air Traffic Control
- Industrial process control
- Broadcast
- Energy sector
- Maritime industry
These are just some of the industries using our KVM devices. Designing a room to serve all these industries seemed almost impossible at first glance. But fortunately, our devices helped with this task. In the ControlCenter-Xperience, everything runs via a ControlCenter-IP KVM matrix. Using scenario switching, we can switch to projectors on the ceiling, video walls, controller stations and even change the design of the walls. This way, the control room switches from an ATC scenario to an industrial application simply by pressing a button. This enables us to provide customers with consulting targeted to their specific industry.
The main focus of the room is on two control room workplaces: The first is equipped with two consoles and one monitor, the second has three consoles and three 240 Hz monitors. These fast super-ultrawide monitors allow us to display the latest trends at high resolution.
We also equipped the workstations with CPU devices, including USB-C hubs. So if you come back to our headquarters one day, you can plug in your tablet, laptop or mobile phone and access the devices through a matrix. We even integrated an Android TV box into the matrix that you can control with a keyboard and mouse. These features allow us to demonstrate how our KVM devices work with other vendors’ equipment.
Additionally, our showroom offers devices with connections from VGA to DP1.2 to demonstrate our mix & match concept. Thus, the high-quality equipment in our showroom is ready for upcoming devices and technological extensions or new standards.
Extra large video wall for displaying CPUs
The eye-catcher of the ControlCenter-Xperience is a video wall with four 55-inch screens. They can display up to six consoles in the highest resolution. In the past, video wall solutions often only allowed you to zoom in and out and change the arrangement of the consoles. But again, we wanted more. Using a touchscreen that displays all active CPUs, you can zoom in and out, “wipe away” and re-arrange them.
The most diverse scenarios and applications in one solution
When using the ControlCenter-Xperience for consulting, we are able to present a wide variety of scenarios and applications. Failure scenarios, whether a network switch, a matrix or the entire server room, security options and redundancy systems in the cloud are just a few of the many examples we can demonstrate in our showroom.
Close up even from a distance
But how can you experience this space without being there? Simply via live video. But during our presentation, you won’t just see a static image from a single perspective. High-end cameras with 40x optical zoom in all corners of the room give you a comprehensive overview of everything our sales staff is showing you. For example, if you’re getting advice on a server room outage, one camera will show the equipment failing in the rack, and another will show the control room switching to cloud mode. When demonstrating CrossDisplay-Switching at the workstation, the camera also zooms in on the monitors to give you a perfect view of what is happening.
In the future, with the help of our new RemoteAccess-GATE, you will even be able to control the consoles via browser and to test functions from home.
Curious? Make an appointment
If you are interested in experiencing KVM in a new way and would like to take a virtual tour of our showroom, you can schedule a live demo right here. We look forward to your requests.
Editor, translator and blogger at Guntermann & Drunck.
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