HP Brings Power and Flexibility of Blade Workstations to MCAD Market

By DE Editors

HP (Palo Alto, CA) unveiled the HP Blade Workstation Solution for the mechanical computer-aided design (MCAD) market. HP’s centralized workstation architecture is tested to provide secure, real-time, interactive access to 3D CAD applications and data — from virtually anywhere, says the company.

Based on the HP BladeSystem infrastructure, the HP Blade Workstation Solution has been certified on 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, which executes user applications and resides in the data center, is designed to deliver maximum performance for MCAD applications, says the company, 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 advantage of the compute and graphics resources of the HP blade workstation. The image 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.

Blade workstations and PCs are at the heart of the HP remote client portfolio of desktop virtualization solutions, which also include its industry-leading thin client portfolio and HP Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), remote deployment, and management software and services.

More information about HP Blade Workstation Solution is available from HP.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.