ELSA Japan has announced that it has teamed up with Lucidlogix to bring the first Hydra based solution to market, although rather unexpected, this is a solution for high-end rendering servers rather than some kind of fancy multi-graphics card gaming solution.

Taking into considering how Hydra works, it actually makes a lot of sense, since with near linear scaling, this should allow for better usage of the computational power of the cards that ELSA will be fitting inside the external enclosure. ELSA will be offering a range of solutions with either two or four Tesla cards, or various Quadro setups. Interestingly, it's also looking like ELSA will be offering its Vixel PC-over-IP solution paired up with two Quadro cards as one possible configuration.

The Hydra solution from ELSA has a lot of potential, although it's unclear how it connects to a host server of workstation at this time. However, it has a large connector at the rear of the PCB which possibly could be an external PCI Express interface, but the press release doesn't reveal any information either which way.

The large cabinet appears to be 4U high and as such will take up a fair amount of space in a server rack, unlike Nvidia's 1U Tesla solution. In its defence, ELSA is offering a much more flexible solution than Nvidia in this case, although we'll have to wait and see how well it performs before any real judgement with regards to it being better or not can be taken.

ELSA will be launching the product towards the end of March for a yet unknown price. We'll keep you posted once more information is revealed.

You can find the press release and some additional images here

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