It’s no secret that Hewlett-Packard (HP) has been seeking a path to a turnaround. On Monday morning, HP President and CEO Meg Whitman unveiled a new vision for the company’s server business that could be what the company’s flagging fortunes need.
“We are living in a period of enormous change,” Whitman says. “Very powerful megatrends are forcing us to change the way technology is delivered, maintained and paid for. What’s emerging out there is a new style of IT driven by social, mobile, cloud and big data.”
Already, nearly 10 billion devices are connected to the Internet. In just a few years, that number could jump to as many as 20 billion objects—cell phones, tablets, sensors, RFID tags, smart meters and more.
“With 10 billion devices connected to the Internet and predictions for exponential growth, we’ve reached a point where the space, power and cost demands of traditional technology are no longer sustainable,” Whitman says.
Want to publish your own articles on DistilINFO Publications?
Send us an email, we will get in touch with you.
The answer, she says, is a new breed of server—a “software-defined” server that is specifically optimized for a particular application. Based on 10 years of research from HP Labs, HP has dubbed this new class of server HP Moonshot. By leveraging energy-efficient components (like Intel Atom S1200 processors commonly used in smartphones and tablets) and shared infrastructure that eliminates replicated components, and then right-sizing everything for a specific application, HP says its Moonshot servers will use up to 89 percent less energy, 80 percent less space and cost 77 percent less than traditional x86 servers.
“HP Moonshot marks the beginning of a new style of IT that will change the infrastructure economics and lay the foundation for the next 20 billion devices,” Whitman says.
The HP Moonshot system consists of the HP Moonshot 1500 enclosure and application-optimized HP ProLiant Moonshot servers. HP will source processors from multiple partners—including AMD, AppliedMicro, Calxeda, Intel and Texas Instruments—each targeting a specific workload, ranging from emerging web, cloud and massive-scale environments to analytics, telecommunications, big data, high-performance computing, gaming, financial services, genomics, facial recognition, video analysis and more.
HP says Moonshot systems will support up to 1,800 servers per rack, occupying one-eighth the space required by traditional servers. Each chassis shares traditional components including fabric, HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLo) management, power supply and cooling fans, which is designed to reduce complexity, energy use and space required.