HP today announced 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 new HP DL380z Virtual Workstation brings together HP's industry-leading server technology, NVIDIA(R) virtualization technology and Citrix(R) virtualization technology -- and delivers it all via HP's highly secure, industry-leading workstation ecosystem.

The HP Z Workstation environment combines HP's understanding of customer needs, key software vendor alliances and HP's workstation system-tuning expertise.

The 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, education and government. The HP DL380z also uses the industry-standard 2U form factor, which means it can easily integrate into a customer's existing data center infrastructure with no additional chassis hardware required.

"As IT needs change, customers are looking to HP for a virtualized workstation solution to support centralized/secure data access, high-availability applications and demanding graphics workloads," said Jim Zafarana, vice president and general manager, Commercial Solutions Business Unit, HP. "The HP DL380z will provide a true workstation experience that offers end-to-end security and industry-leading ILO (Integrated Lights Out) centralized management in an industry-standard 2U form factor."

HP expands the data center workstation experience The new HP DL380z enables use of dual NVIDIA GRID K2 graphics cards and NVIDIA GRID(TM) GPU virtualization, supports up to eight users on one workstation. NVIDIA Quadro K6000, K5000 and K4000 graphics cards also are supported. By keeping the compute engine colocated with high-performance storage arrays in the data center, customers can experience dramatically reduced project load times.

"The HP solution will deliver dynamic, high-performance graphics that take full advantage of NVIDIA's GRID technologies -- the first virtualized GPUs designed for data center delivery of graphics applications," said Justin Boitano, general manager, Cloud & Virtualization Solutions, NVIDIA. "These data center solutions will provide true workstation-class high-performance computing experiences in a virtual ecosystem made possible by GRID GPUs."

The HP DL380z is certified for the Citrix virtualization stack including HDX 3D Pro technology to ensure high-performance remote access to workstation-class applications.

"Enterprises that are adopting app and desktop virtualization to provide a personalized mobile workspace must address a key user group: design and engineering users. Organizations must maintain tight security and control over valuable intellectual property as these users become more mobile and distributed," said Rakesh Narasimhan, group vice president and general manager, Desktops and Apps, Citrix. "Providing customers with the powerful combination of HDX 3D Pro in XenDesktop with HP's virtual workstation with NVIDIA technology, we can deliver the high-performance experience of 3-D apps that this specialized workforce needs."

The HP DL380z keeps intellectual property and other sensitive data centralized and secure by transmitting encrypted pixel data over LAN or WAN to remote users. It also allows for flexible IT management with a choice of pass-through GPU and virtual GPU modes that can be configured according to usage needs, making IT change management simple and efficient.

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

Pricing and availability The HP DL380z is planned to be available beginning in June. Pricing is available upon request.