HP claims industry first with virtual workstation

Hewlett-Packard has released a virtual workstation product it claims is the first in the industry to virtualise graphical processing power.

"We're giving a slice of the graphics card to each virtual [workstation]," said Anneliese Olson, VP of personal computing at HP APJ. "This is an industry first."

Olson told CRN at HP's media event in Mumbai that the HP DL380z virtual workstation was created in partnership with Citrix virtualisation nous and NVIDIA's experience in graphics. The result is "excellent graphics", even through a thin client.

"We're looking at graphics-intensive fields like the auto industry and the entertainment industry as target markets," said Olson. "Having a virtual workstation through a thin client means security – having the data all centralised."

HP stated that having the graphical processing take place in the data centre, alongside the storage arrays, also results in performance gains.

The launch statement from the vendor said: "The new DL380z supports dual NVIDIA GRID K2 graphics cards and NVIDIA GRID GPU virtualisation that enables support of up to eight users in one DL380z. NVIDIA Quadro K6000, K5000 and K4000 graphics cards are also supported."

The HP DL380z will be available in Australia this month, with the vendor not disclosing a price.

The reporter travelled to Mumbai, India courtesy of Hewlett-Packard.