HP Reinvents The Industry-Standard Server

HP’s next generation of ProLiant servers will be more self-sufficient and automated, reducing up to 50% of manual operations. The company unveiled ProLiant Generation 8 in Las Vegas as part of its Project Voyager initiative.

The servers, which will be available starting March 6, is the first set of products from Project Voyager, an HP initiative designed to redefine the expectations and economics of the data center. The company has injected additional intelligence into the server line to increase automation, which will save clients millions of dollars in operations costs, says Jeff Carlat, director of software marketing for industry-standard servers and software at HP.

"Generation 8 is not a commodity server. We are truly delivering a premium product in what’s to be considered a commodity market. The innovation that’s going on here will really drive greater value for customers," he states.

Whether the Generation 8 servers offer a truly unique value proposition remains to be seen, and, according to Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, virtually every other x86 vendor is pursuing a similar kind of product development strategy.

"I think there are a lot of positive elements to the announcement. I’m always a little wary when I hear a vendor saying they’re going to be changing the market with a unique new approach," he says. "I think that HP should be congratulated in taking what is clearly a very serious approach to delivering integrated systems that are built to maximize both the value of the company’s investments in these new systems and also to drive savings in the long-term operational expenditures that supporting those systems over time will require."

According to HP, an enterprise spends more than $45 million per year on manual operations (including server administration, application deployment, and power and cooling management) in the average 10,000-square-foot data center. Manual operations introduce human errors, which can cause unexpected downtime and cost companies an additional $10 million per hour. The new servers were designed to take much of the manual operation away from administrators by automating the tasks.

The value of ProLiant Generation 8 servers is in their ability to adapt to their environment in real time by continuously analyzing thousands of system parameters, which enables them to optimize the performance of applications and improve uptime. According to HP, automating previously manual tasks also improves productivity while reducing the number of errors and simplifying operations for dynamic computing models like virtualization and cloud.

Generation 8 servers are built on HP ProActive Insight architecture, which Carlat says provides several key benefits for customers. ProActive Insight provides continuous intelligence on various server diagnostics, including server health and power usage. According to HP, this means online systems can be deployed three times faster and downtime reduced by as much as 93%.

Integrated lifecycle automation drives more intelligence into the servers to make them smarter and more efficient, reducing administrator time by up to 69% during online updates. HP has embedded the ability to do intelligent provisioning into a NAND flash on the server. It has decreased the number of steps to deploy a ProLiant server by 45%. Carlat says that since keeping server firmware versions up to date is a customer pain point, the company has built in a smart update feature to make firmware updates simple and quick. Continuous monitoring of system health can improve uptime and speed up root-cause analysis by five times, according to HP.

Dynamic workload acceleration increases storage and application performance by 100 times over previous-generation ProLiant models and, according to HP, competing servers. HP has optimized the servers for SSD, giving a six-times improvement over previous versions of its servers using SSD. Additionally, it has built in functionality for advanced data mirroring (three-drive mirroring), performance tuning, and enhancements for applications and storage so they can operate at improved levels over previous servers.

Automated energy optimization provides more intelligence in power and cooling management so that the servers use 10% less energy. Each server is also constructed with 64 thermal sensors with X, Y and Z axis for more efficient fan control and cooling. With Generation 8, racks are also given additional intelligence so that Insight Control 7 software will know where the server is connected, including the rack ID number and U location (which is listed in the server’s memory), allowing for easy location discovery of ProLiant servers.

Proactive services and support will be available that unite server management and the support experience. With Insight Online, customers will have personalized portals they can access from anywhere to view and manage the servers under their control.

Through its services organization, HP will offer customers aid in data center renewal and planning to help define a strategy and roadmap for migration to ProLiant Generation 8 servers.

"It can be somewhat seen as a daunting task, but HP is here on a global basis to help with that," says Carlat.

According to King, HP is presenting a value proposition that tackles both performance and value at the front end and maximizes efficiency for value over time. Although the approach is a departure from previous generations of ProLiant, King notes that it’s a strategy being pursued by all of HP’s competitors. If successful, it could push HP customers to adopt the new technology and move away from servers they may have been using in their data centers for years, he adds.

One potentially significant impact on third-party management software vendors is that as HP and other vendors continue to drive additional value with their own management software platforms, the need for third-party management platforms is diminished, King says. What could potentially be very good for HP customers could be quite bad for third-party vendors that have management platforms that support HP servers, he adds.

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