Hardware Geeks

Today HP has announced the new HP Z Series Workstations. The Z series Workstations which are designed in part by BMW Designworks will deliver the processing power that was once only available from a super computer.

The Z Series workstations come in 3 models, the affordable Z400 with a single Intel Xeon 5500 (Quad Core) processor perfect for any size business, the Mid Range Z600 which is the smallest dual processor workstation in the world, and the Z800 a great looking machine that will give you a petaFLOP of processing power with two Intel Xeons 5500 and up to 192 GB of memory. The systems will also come with the new NVIDIA Quadro Professional line of graphics cards (FX 5800) which were announced today also. All three machines are rack mountable. The Z400 and Z800 will also have a liquid cooling option which will be available in Q3.

A quick rundown on the system Specs:

Being that we are in this bad economy, one wonders what company big or small could afford a new fleet of workstations? After all companies are laying off people left and right.

But at the same time if a company has a smaller work force, they are going to need their remaining employees to pick up the slack, and that’s going to be hard to do with an older Workstation.

For example, some studies and benchmarking done by HP Partners who are already using the Z Series workstations show a return on investment in as little as 14 days and in some cases more than doubling the productivity of their employees.

For example, DreamWorks makers of such great films as “Monsters vs. Aliens” and “Shrek” no longer saw downtime for their employees when they rendered a scene. Jeff Wood Director for Product Marketing at HP said, the first time he went to DreamWorks he saw animators doing pushups in hallways. When he asked what was going on, he was told they were rendering. Essentially what that meant was, their systems would bog down and become useless when they were rendering a scene, but with HP workstations they could render while they worked on another scene.

Another example is French company Schlumberger, they are a Oil and Gas company probably the biggest company you and I have never heard of. Schlumberger which is currently using the Z600 and Z800 workstations has seen an increase of 33% in productivity because of these workstations.

They work with files that are sometimes Terabytes in size, the files display different levels in the earth’s crust and shows them in 3D where oil and gas may be. Prior to having a Z600 or Z800 workstation, it would take 50 seconds for 1 frame to load, now they are getting 30 + frames per second, and that is without even using the full power of the workstation.

Why aren’t they using the full power of their workstations? Because they are using their Workstations as dual workstations, normally Schlumberger and other companies would have two workstations at each persons desk, one running Windows the other running Linux. Since the Z600 and Z800 are so powerful they can run both OS’s (One Virtually) on the same machine at the same time using two monitors to display each OS. They do this with a new software available soon (with-in the next 6 weeks) from Parallels, which will allows them to dedicate one of the two, CPU’s one of the two video cards and as much memory as they would like to any of the installed Operating Systems. Just a side note, you need to have a NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800, Quadro FX 4800, and Quadro FX 5800 to use this feature which is called ”SLI Multi-OS”

Another example is Colorado University, who found it faster to process data on their Z800 workstations instead of using the school’s mainframe. I would of thought the mainframe would have been faster. Just imagine if you clustered a bunch of these Z800’s together what kind of mainframe you could create. 

The above three examples, were done by independent companies not HP and they pretty much show how powerful these machines are, and how much more work you can get done with them.

Just think about how fast city planners can design and plan a city with the Z series workstations, with all that Stimulus money floating out of DC companies should jump at the chance to get some of these workstations.

I had a chance to speak to a few companies that are already using the new Z series workstations and each have all said the same thing.  They said the systems were reliable and quite. A quite system equals a less noisy environment which studies have shown help reduce stress and increase productivity. I spoke with someone from the BMW Formula 1 team, and he said you use to hear the hum of the fans in their facility and now you don’t.

The Z workstations also generate less heat and require less power than previous workstations from HP and 90% of the system is recyclable. So the systems are environment friendly, and are all Energy Star Rated Version 5 and EPEAT Gold.

If you noticed the specs above, the systems will use less than 1 watt of power when turned off in compliance with new UK regulation. However when this is enabled (via the bios) this will force Wake on LAN to be disabled.

But performance and being green aren’t the only great things about the Z600 and Z800, both have a unique inner design, which will make it easy for any tech to replace any problem components I think it was Terry Pilsner, VP of R&D at HP who said it’s the bleed less design, because you will no longer end up with a bloody hand after replacing components on the Z600 and Z800 because of their tooless design which is similar to the HP Blackbird. The cabling on both systems are mostly hidden, allowing for good airflow. 

What makes the design even more amazing is the Power Supply (PSU) each use. The PSU for the Z600 and Z800 are slightly different but unique to other PSU’s you may have seen in the past.  The PSU’s on both the Z600 and Z800 can be removed without having to undo any cables, and are designed in a way to pull cool air from the front of the System instead of the hot air from over the CPU. This in theory will give you a PSU with a longer life span.

The reason for the unique PSU design is because HP carved handles into the case for easy transport.

As Jim Zafarana Vice President and General Manager of Workstations WW says, “these systems rock”, and I have to agree. I never thought I would say a workstation rocks but these workstations rock because they powerful, energy efficient and will save your business money. Money you can put towards hiring new employees hopefully.

The new HP Z Workstation series is expected to be available worldwide starting April 6. U.S. pricing starts at $1,999 for the HP Z800 Workstation; $1,679 for the HP Z600 Workstation; and $969 for the HP Z400 Workstation. For more information please visit http://www.hp.com/personalagain

Even though we only have had limited time with the Z series Workstations, we think that they are such a great product and can do so much for companies large and small, we have decided to award it our Gold Editors Choice Award for the month of March 2009, since no other product we have reviewed or tested this month can top the Z series workstations.

Post Tags: hp  workstation  intel xeon 5500  z workstations 

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