HP Virtualizes Z Workstation Family

LOS ANGELES — HP has taken the power of its Z Workstation series and placed it in the cloud to allow users to gain access from anywhere in the world. The new HP DL380z Virtual Workstation provides secure, remote access to workstation-class applications from a variety of devices including thin clients, notebooks and tablets.

The HP DL380z combines HP's server technology, NVIDIA's virtualization technology and Citrix's virtualization technology. It's an extension of the HP family of virtualization solutions and uses the industry-standard 2RU form factor, which means it can easily integrate into a customer's existing data center infrastructure with no additional chassis hardware required.

The HP DL380z Virtual Workstation delivers high-performance graphics that take full advantage of NVIDIA's GRID technologies.

"As IT needs change, customers are looking to HP for a virtualized workstation solution to support centralized/secure data access, high-availability applications and demanding graphics workloads," said Jim Zafarana, vice president and general manager, Commercial Solutions Business Unit, HP.."

The new HP DL380z enables the use of dual NVIDIA GRID K2 graphics cards and NVIDIA GRID GPU virtualization, while supporting up to eight users on one workstation. NVIDIA Quadro K6000, K5000 and K4000 graphics cards also are supported. By keeping the compute engine co-located with high-performance storage arrays in the data center, customers can experience dramatically reduced project load times.

"The HP solution will deliver dynamic, high-performance graphics that take full advantage of NVIDIA's GRID technologies—the first virtualized GPUs designed for data center delivery of graphics applications," said Justin Boitano, general manager, Cloud & Virtualization Solutions, NVIDIA. "These data center solutions will provide true workstation-class high-performance computing experiences in a virtual ecosystem made possible by GRID GPUs."

The HP DL380z is certified for the Citrix virtualization stack including HDX 3D Pro technology to ensure high-performance remote access to workstation-class applications.

HP said the DL380z keeps intellectual property and other sensitive data centralized and secure by transmitting encrypted pixel data over LAN or WAN to remote users. It also allows provides a choice of pass-through GPU and virtual GPU modes that can be configured according to usage needs, making IT change management simple and efficient.

The HP DL380z also supports HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS), which pioneered remote access to graphics rich applications and the ability to host collaboration sessions from multiple devices and multiple operating systems including Linux. The newest HP RGS release 7 added the ability to have true workstation productivity from a tablet while bringing intuitive touch controls to non-touch applications. The workstation also supports HP Velocity software, which significantly improves network performance.

The HP DL380z will be available beginning in June.