The King of the Workstations

Posted on Mar 4, 2019 by Alex Fice

HP workstations are the standard across the creative industries in London and beyond. There are some very good reasons for that

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Equipment reseller Escape Technology has been a Gold Partner of HP’s Workstation range for nearly ten years and that brings with it some caché for both brands. You have to earn the title with proven sales and support but when you become a customer on whatever level, you also benefit.

At the moment Escape supports over 40 companies with HP and other equipment. But if you’re an independent filmmaker, for instance, and walk into the company’s office, the service and choices you’ll be offered are just the same.

In fact, as a Gold Partner with HP, Escape might be able to find you a very good deal on a used HP Workstation and also explain your choices from there, on premises and in the cloud.

Remote Access

Although in the large majority of cases Escape will provide you with a workstation you can use wherever you are, there are times that using your power remotely is a necessity. This is usually to do with security in the larger studios. In these cases, Escape can arrange for you to access your processing and rendering power when you’re working at a client’s premises or off-site.

You can even measure how much rendering time you are using remotely so your employer can see what they’re paying for. Nick Mathews from Escape explains further: “We can achieve remote access to compute power, which we do with many of our customers, with PC over IP – a protocol that allows you that access. Your project could be stored in a cloud volume or on a local server connected to your workstation. And that workstation could also be cloud based, in a data centre, or on-site.”

“We ensure that each build is set up with the right technology for the job at hand”

Many Genres

Although the VFX world is a major customer of Escape’s, HP Workstations are also used by other industries like architecture, industrial design studios, motion graphics, visualisation and automotive. They all have common requirements, for example to be able to model something virtually and then to be able to render it into a lifelike photorealistic image at the end of it.

“We cover a range of different specifications for different requirements,” continues Mathews. “Certain applications, such as Flame, are very resource intensive and place a high demand on hardware. That means using the best processors, it has to have lots of RAM, and very fast storage built in. In 99% of cases that’s an HP machine.

“We ensure that each build is set up with the right technology for the job at hand. That might mean a new HP Z6 with an NVIDIA RTX GPU, or a previous generation ex-studio machine with a bit of an upgrade.”

The HP Workstation range is the predominant standard in all these industries and with Escape Technology’s Gold Partner status you are assured of the best customer service.