HP Unveils Blade Workstations for MCAD

May 5, 2008

HP unveiled its 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.