HP takes its Z workstation family virtual

HP DL380z Virtual Workstation

HP DL380z Virtual Workstation

Today at the Citrix Synergy event in L.A., HP is announcing and displaying its new HP DL380z Virtual Workstation, a virtual workstation solution that provides secure, remote access to workstation-class applications from a variety of devices including thin clients, notebooks and tablets.

“The HP DL380z Virtual Workstation combines the industry’s leading server technology with the industry’s leading workstation ecosystem,” said Jeff Groudan, Worldwide Director, Thin Client and Virtual Workstation Product Management at HP. It also includes both NVIDIA virtualization technology and Citrix virtualization technology.

“This is a 2U rack system for up to 8 workstation users,” Groudan said. “It supports most of the key industry standard hypervisors.”  It is, however, tightly integrated with Citrix and is certified for the Citrix virtualization stack including HDX 3D Pro technology.

“We integrate tightly with our key technology partners, and Citrix is really focused on the use cases for the HP DL380z,” Groudan said. HP DL380z is an extension of the HP family of virtualization solutions designed for evolving work styles within the fields of engineering, CAD (computer-aided design), AEC (architecture, engineering and construction), digital media, oil and gas exploration, product lifecycle management and education and government.

The HP DL380z enables use of dual NVIDIA GRID K2 graphics cards and takes full advantage of NVIDIA GRID GPU virtualization, the first virtualized GPUs designed for data center delivery of graphics applications. It also supports NVIDIA Quadro K6000, K5000 and K4000 graphics cards also are supported.

“Performance benefits greatly from the dataset proximity,” Groudan said.  Keeping the compute engine colocated with high-performance storage arrays in the data center results in dramatically reduced project load times.

Unique HP software also improves productivity, Groudan added. The HP DL380z supports HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS), which facilitates remote access to graphics rich applications and the ability to host collaboration sessions from multiple devices and multiple operating systems including Linux. The recently introduced HP RGS release 7 added the ability to have true workstation productivity from a tablet while bringing intuitive touch controls to nontouch applications

“HP Remote Graphics software improves performance by providing vibrant high end graphics even though it’s virtual,” he said.

Groudan also pointed to HP Velocity 2.1 software, which improves network performance, as another software asset.

Security is another major benefit, Groudan stressed.

“All the data is in the data center, not on local endpoints,” he said. “The only thing on the endpoints is pixels. There’s a major value proposition in securing your sensitive data.”

This article originally appeared on eChannelLine.com.