HP and Lucasfilm Ltd., known in visual effects and sound engineering for feature films, recently announced a global, three-year, multi-million dollar technology and marketing agreement.

Lucasfilm will use HP Adaptive Enterprise solutions to generate new video games, visual effects and animation. The HP technology, also being used to store and manage LucasFilm’s business applications, will be deployed at Lucasfilm's new Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio of San Francisco and at the company's Singapore operations.

Lucasfilm will roll out up to 1,000 high-performance HP workstations powered by Dual-Core AMD Opteron™ processors for the production of its visual effects and video games. The HP xw9300 Workstation environment at Lucasfilm will run both Linux and Windows® XP operating environments in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes, with in-house software applications for creation and editing.

In addition, HP Services is working closely with Lucasfilm to deploy a storage environment to securely store and archive critical business information.

Lucas visual effects and game development requires the most powerful workstation configurations available. The 64-bit dual processor, dual-core and dual-graphics HP workstation is designed for customers with such intensive computing demands.

The HP xw9300 Workstation's performance and visualization capabilities are enabled by the processing power of two AMD Opteron™ processors and advanced 3D graphics capabilities made possible by NVIDIA's dual PCI Express x16 graphics.

LucasArts' long-term relationship with nVidia remains intact. Each workstation uses nVidia's dual PCI Express x16 graphics cards, enabling advanced 3-D graphics capabilities, and every one can support multiple graphics cards.

Lucasfilm selected the latest HP StorageWorks offerings for its business applications. With a 35-terabyte capacity, the HP StorageWorks XP12000 Disk Array and Cisco MDS 9509 is a high-end disk storage system delivering “zero downtime” for mission-critical environments.

The system incorporates HP software innovations for single-system management, remote copying and cross-continental disaster recovery. The HP StorageWorks XP12000 Disk Array offers Lucasfilm an advanced solution available to ensure business continuity and asset protection.