Changing the Graphics Equation

Even when sales of PCs were their most anemic levels, workstations were still hot. As the price differential between a high-end PC and workstation narrowed, many organizations simply opted to pay a premium to get access to significantly higher graphics performance.

A lot of those workstations were not traditional desktops but rather mobile systems, which in turn put a lot of pressure on the network as ever-large files were transferred between mobile workstations and servers.

To address that particular issue Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) recently unveiled two distinct approaches to making it easier to support graphics applications in distributed environments.

Along with a slew of upgrades to its mobile workstations, HP earlier this month unveiled an HP DL380z Virtual Workstation Gen 9 appliance that comes loaded with NVIDIA GRID graphics cards. Designed to fit in a 2u rack, the HP DL 380z is based on Intel E5 v3 processors that provide access to up to 36 cores and 1.5 TB DDR4 memory.

At that same time, HP released version 7.1 of HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS), which significantly improved the real-time experience for end users accessing graphic files over the network using a PC, thin client or Windows tablet.

HP then followed that up a few weeks later with the release of HP True Graphics software that extended Citrix HDX 3D Pro and Citrix Super Codec technologies by redirecting encoded h.264 data to the local hardware decoders on select HP thin clients. Tom Flynn, chief technologist for thin computing in the HP Commercial Solutions group, said this approach allows users that don’t necessarily need a dedicated workstation to interact with graphics files over a network without latency issues degrading their experience.

When all these things are put together by a solution provider, a set of complementary technologies emerges in a way that enables customers to change the way they work with their most important intellectual property. Instead of transferring massive files over the network, it becomes a lot simpler to allow distributed teams of engineers and their managers to interact with graphics files on the servers or appliances where they are actually stored.

For HP partners, that means that instead of having a conversation about system upgrades, the discussion can now shift to improving the productivity of an entire organization.

There’s nothing that gives organizations more cause for pause than the idea that their most valuable intellectual property is either being transferred across a network or, worse yet, being delivered by an overnight service because the files were too big to send across the network. By starting the conversation there, the IT infrastructure required to prevent any of that from having to occur in the first place quickly becomes a secondary consideration.