HP Blades Pitched To Slice Into Server Sprawl

HP has unveiled seven new server blades and three rack-mount systems aimed at the high-end market. Mostly based on Intel Nehalem EX Xeon processors, the new servers are designed to reduce complexity and sprawl at the network edge and speed up application delivery.

The new server blades, launched at HP’s Tech Forum event in Las Vegas,  contain up to one terabyte of memory, which the company claims can support up to four times more virtual machines than its competitors’ blades. They are integrated with HP’s Virtual Connect FlexFabric technology, launched in 2009, which simplifies the process of connecting servers to storage and networking, as well as improving virtualisation performance and efficiency.

First blade with a terabyte per server

The ProLiant BL680c G7 is the industry’s first server blade to feature one terabyte of memory per server and supports up to three times more virtual machines per blade server, while requiring 73 percent less hardware per 1,000 virtual machines. Meanwhile, the ProLiant BL620c G7 supports up to four times more virtual machines and requires 66 percent less hardware than previous HP blades.

HP also showed the BL465c and BL685c, designed to deliver improved virtualisation return on investment, and the BL460c and BL490c, which simplify network integration. Finally, the ProLiant BL2x220c G7 for high-performance computing environments provides 20 times more bandwidth two times the performance per rack of other blades.

The new servers, together with the three new scale-up HP ProLiant DL580 and DL585 and DL980 rack-optimised servers, make up some of the key building blocks in HP’s converged infrastructure strategy. This also includes its ProCurve networking business – recently given a massive boost by the company’s acquisition of 3Com – its storage business and management software.  HP believes that a converged strategy will help clients to eliminate sprawl and excess maintenance costs, by pulling together technologies from multiple vendors into pools of interoperable resources.

These servers, and the promise to reduce sprawl, follow from HP’s new slogan of “breaking information gridlock”  introduced earlier this year.

“For the past two decades all infrastructure has really been built in silos. People built individual stacks of servers, individual stacks of storage, individual stacks of networking, individual stacks of management,” explained Dave Donatelli (left), executive vice president and general manager of enterprise servers, storage and networking at HP, speaking at the HP Tech Forum.

“One of the neat things about HP is we’re the only large company in IT that actually develops all of those different products. And because we develop all of these different products, we can from the ground up integrate and develop them together in such a way that we bring these technologies back together again,” he said.

Getting the right balance

According to a global survey conducted by HP, most customers spend more than 70 percent of their IT budget managing existing operations. This leaves only 30 percent for driving new IT initiatives through innovation – a ratio which HP would like to reverse.

Data-intensive enterprise workloads are massively increasing the need for scalable, reliable and performance-oriented solutions. Donatelli claims the HP ProLiant DL585 G7 can deliver a return on investment in as little as 30 days, while offering a number of innovations in automation. Meanwhile, the DL980 is also able to protect virtual machines and applications through “self-healing” – an automatic process which isolates and removes virtualised systems when faults occur, without shutting down the entire server.

HP claims the G7 ProLiant line-up can enable reduction in energy costs by 96 percent and a reduced data centre footprint with a consolidation ratio up to 91:1.

HP has also updated its BladeSystem Matrix, launched early in 2009 and updated since then. The latest version simplifies the creation of private clouds and features automated storage tiering, which assigns storage based on application performance and availability. HP claims it can cut cost of ownership by up to 50 percent.

Finally, HP announced its first-generation offering in the growing data deduplication market, debuting its StoreOnce D2D4312 backup software, designed to compete with rivals such as IBM and EMC . The company claims StoreOnce enables clients to reduce its spending on storage capacity by 95 percent, while simplifying the whole process of storage and deduplication.

The technology is designed to integrate with HP servers and with industry-standard architecture, allowing the storage business to benefit from all the other R&D within HP networking and server development.