Prepress

HP Brings Power and Flexibility of Blade Workstations to MCAD Market

Wednesday 30. April 2008 - HP today unveiled the HP Blade Workstation Solution for the mechanical computer-aided design (MCAD) market, HP’s centralized workstation architecture that is now tested and certified to provide secure, real-time, interactive access to 3D CAD applications and data - from virtually anywhere.

The offering speeds up the MCAD design process by helping to improve worker productivity and collaboration, making it ideal for customers in this fast-paced market who are increasingly faced with the need to consolidate databases, set up remote offices and provide secure, shared access to MCAD applications.

“HP’s client virtualization and remote access expertise, combined with our deep industry partnerships, deliver an entirely new and more flexible working environment for the MCAD market,” said Jeff Groudan, vice president of marketing, Desktop Solutions Organization, HP. “Centralizing computing power in the data center and allowing remote access from most any location can allow engineers to improve collaboration with their peers and clients, creating optimal levels of productivity and security while reducing overall IT costs.”

Based on the HP BladeSystem infrastructure, the HP Blade Workstation Solution has been tested and certified on a variety of leading MCAD applications, enabling users to quickly and seamlessly access CATIA, Siemens UGS NX, PTC Pro/ENGINEER, Autodesk AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, SolidWorks and MicroStation – as well as related applications such as Autodesk Revit – all running securely on blade workstations in the data center.

“The HP Blade Workstation Solution allows MCAD engineering professionals to work together and make decisions in real time, with more secure access to workstation resources, applications and data,” said Barbara Tabb, director, alliance program operations, Dassault Systèmes. “HP blade workstations are a great hardware choice for our customers using Dassault Systèmes 3D PLM applications.”

The HP blade workstation, which executes user applications and resides in the data center, is designed to deliver maximum performance for MCAD applications and can be configured with one or two high-speed Intel Xeon dual-core or quad-core processors and a dedicated NVIDIA FX 1600M hardware graphics card that computes and renders the interactive desktop image.

The interactive desktop image is sent via HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS), an advanced network utility designed to take full advantage of the compute and graphics resources of the HP blade workstation. The image also delivers real-time interactive access to users of MCAD applications, regardless of location. RGS works seamlessly, over a standard computer network, with complex applications including 2D design, 3D solid modeling, rendering, simulation and video animation.

The architecture provides interactive remote access to HP workstation-class computing and visualization power as well as high-speed, encrypted image transfer through standard LAN, WAN or VPN connections to almost any access device, such as HP thin client devices or Microsoft Windows-based workstations, PCs or notebooks. This significantly streamlines the design process through more effective collaboration and helps meet customer and regulatory mandates for highly secure data protection.

A remote client infrastructure can provide MCAD customers a variety of benefits, including:

Faster access to data – Minimizes the time-consuming downloading and uploading of CAD files over lower-speed networks by placing workstations in the data center with high-bandwidth connections to product data management systems. Remote sites’ data access is dramatically improved with RGS, which sends encrypted, compressed pixels of the screen image rather than unsecured data models across the network, and returns only keystrokes and mouse clicks.
More effective collaboration – Allows geographically dispersed design teams to view and interact with large digital prototypes in real time. RGS allows the remote HP blade workstation screen image to be shared with multiple simultaneous users with either view-only or full-interaction access so they can interactively collaborate to make better decisions, faster.
Improved productivity for remote workers – RGS supports a new mobile and collaborative work paradigm that helps eliminate distance barriers that can impede global organizations. RGS untethers engineering professionals from their desks, allowing them to connect to their high-performance workstation resources when and where they need them (from the office, conference room, manufacturing floor, remote site, home, etc.) over a standard network connection. The workstation resources are always on and available, with data and applications already loaded, dramatically improving productivity.
Increased data security – Aids in the protection of a company’s intellectual property by moving MCAD applications and data back into a secure data center where they can be more easily managed, monitored, backed up and protected. Mobile and remote employees can access high-performance workstation resources without proprietary data being transferred from the blade workstation. Only encrypted, compressed screen images are sent, many times per second, to end-users on receiving systems. The centralized architecture also enables both private and public sector organizations to better implement security mandates to protect valuable data and security-restricted applications.
Reduced IT costs – Reduces management costs by centralizing and consolidating workstation resources, applications and design databases into a single point of management within the data center. This consolidation, when combined with users’ ability to access resources from HP thin clients or Microsoft Windows XP desktops, also reduces desk-side hardware and support costs while nearly eliminating change and local maintenance costs associated with dynamic product development environments.
Increased resource utilization and flexibility – Enables IT to define pools of optimally configured blade workstation resources that can be allocated and shared across a broader range of users to optimize application performance and resource utilization. Resources can be easily moved between pools and re-imaged to balance resource needs across programs. End-users can enjoy cross-platform, on-demand access to Windows XP-32, Windows XP-64, HP-UX and RHEL compute and visualization applications from a single desktop with single keyboard and mouse interaction. Engineers can now focus on engineering and leave the application and system management functions to IT.