HP Ships ‘Moonshot’ Servers For Big Data, Cloud

Hewlett-Packard is beginning to ship its ultra-low-power Project Moonshot servers, with the first ones powered by Intel’s Atom S1200 Centerton chip and the promise of more systems running on other processors from the likes of ARM partners Calxeda, Texas Instruments and Advanced Micro Devices.

During a webcast event for journalists and analysts on 8 April, HP executives, including President and chief executive Meg Whitman, touted the servers as being as important a step in the server industry as the shift from mainframes to Unix systems and the introduction of x86 servers.

Customised servers

With the Moonshot systems, the company is promising servers that are designed for particular workloads – from cloud computing to big data to mobile – and can be customised by users to suit their needs.

Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager of HP’s Enterprise Group, called the new systems the industry’s first “software-defined servers” – systems that are designed for the software workloads they run. These first systems will focus on cloud workloads.

HP first introduced its Project Moonshot in November 2011, with officials announcing they were going to work with Calxeda to develop very-low-power servers powered by ARM-designed chips that would run Internet workloads in the massive, dense data centres that are becoming increasingly commonplace. However, executives said last year that the first of these systems would be powered by Intel’s Centerton.

There have been more than 50 companies in HP’s beta programme for the system, Donatelli said.

The ProLiant Moonshot systems are designed to offer high performance while greatly reducing floor space, power consumption and overall costs. During the webcast, Whitman cited such trends as big data, cloud computing and greater mobility, including the increased use of smartphones and tablets.

The overwhelming amounts of data being created through these trends are forcing organisations to build massive data centres that consume tremendous amounts of power; to keep up with demand, data centres in the future running traditional systems would have to be 200 yards long and would need 10 new power plants to generate an amount of energy equal to what 2 million typical US homes consume.

“Right now, we’re on a path that is not sustainable in space, power or cost perspectives,” Whitman said.

Sustainability

The Moonshot systems are designed to address that, using 89 percent less power and 80 percent less space than traditional systems, while reducing complexity by 97 percent and overall costs by 77 percent, according to Donatelli.

HP can fit 1,800 Moonshot servers in a rack. Given the demands being put on data centres, “you can’t just make a few tweaks in design to make those problems go away,” he said.

The systems fit into Moonshot 1500 chassis. They currently are selling, starting at $61,875 (£40,500), in the United States and Canada. They will be available worldwide and through channel partners in May.

Keys to the Moonshot systems include sharing various components – from cooling and networking to power supply and HP’s Integrated Lights-Out management software – as well as fine-tuning what’s needed, such as the amount of power used by the system, according to Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager of HP’s Industry Standard Servers and Software Group.

During the webcast, Patrick Moorhead, principle analyst with Moor Insights, said the new architecture that HP is bringing with Moonshot is important because of the new demands being put on data centres, not just by computers and mobile devices, but the rapidly growing number of sensors being used by organisations, creating what analysts and vendors are calling the Internet of Things.

“The data centre is not set up to do that,” Moorhead said. “We just can’t go into the future with a data centre architecture that is almost 25 years old. We need a new architecture.”

HP executives expect to roll out more Moonshot servers in the second half of the year for such environments at web workloads, cloud computing and massive data centres, as well as analytics and telecommunications.

Broad architecture support

Future systems will be optimised for high-performance computing, financial services, facial recognition, video analysis and other workloads. They will be powered by chips from a range of vendors, including Intel – which this week is showing off the next-generation microserver Atom chip, dubbed “Avoton” – as well as Advanced Micro Devices and ARM partners AppliedMicro, Calxeda and Texas Instruments.

That broad offering of architectures is a key part of what HP is doing with Project Moonshot, Potter said.

Not only will the company be able to accelerate by three times the rate that it releases new servers – thanks to no longer being tied solely to Intel’s 18- to 24-month cycle – but it allows a level of customisation that the industry hasn’t seen before, both crucial factors when dealing with the emerging workloads coming into the data centre, he said.

“General-purpose [chips don’t] really fit their needs,” Potter told eWEEK.

Along with the Moonshot systems, HP also is rolling out its Pathfinder Innovation Ecosystem, an initiative aimed at enabling software developers to build applications that can be optimised for the systems. In addition, HP’s Discovery Labs enables customers and partners to access Moonshot systems housed in HP’s data centre to test and benchmark solutions.

“Only someone like HP can [create a place] where people can come together and innovate,” Potter said.

Both Donatelli and Potter said the new systems will be complementary to the company’s x86-based traditional ProLiant systems.

Donatelli noted that the x86 server market is a $40 billion space. “x86 will be here a long time [and] Moonshot will be here a long time,” he said. “It’s just that you’ll see rapid growth in Moonshot.”

HPs turnaround

The Moonshot systems come as HP undergoes a multi-year turnaround programme under Whitman following several years of upheaval, management instability and disappointing financial numbers. However, Roger Kay, principal analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates, said Whitman is bringing stability back to the company, and it’s beginning to work.

“Ms. Whitman has kept HP on a relatively even keel over the past 18 months, and things at the company are beginning to look up,” Kay wrote in an 8 April column in Forbes.com. “From a November 2012 low of $11.35, the stock is up into the low 20s, about a double… HP still has many arrows in its quiver. It just needs the time and stability to pull each one out with a steady hand, set it to the bowstring, pull back, and fire.”

Do you know all about HP, the IT firm from the garage? Take our quiz!

Originally published on eWeek.