Hewlett-Packard’s New Servers “Built For The Planet”

Nearly a month ago the multinational information technology giant Hewlett-Packard released its latest server system, the HP Moonshot. HP is billing the Moonshot as being “designed for the data center, built for the planet,” and the specs back up the catchy claim; Moonshot uses 89% less energy, 80% less space and costs 77% less than traditional servers.

Designed for use with “social, cloud, mobile, and big data,” HP Moonshot is the company’s “second generation” server technology, and is meant to push past the current stalemate being encountered by traditional server infrastructure.

“With nearly 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,” said Meg Whitman, HP’s president and chief executive officer. “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.”

The Moonshot is the first “software defined” server that will allow enterprises the ability to optimise their servers based on their specific workload needs. No longer one server system for every need, the second generation to come out of HP Moonshot will provide for the specifics of running social, cloud, mobile, and big data server systems.

Building for the planet is not a new concept, but HP have outdone themselves with the Moonshot. Built from chips that are more commonly found in your smartphone or tablet, the new servers are subsequently much more energy efficient, and come with a comparative downshift in size as well.

Given the ever-increasing need for more storage, server storage locations have grown in size and energy requirements. Occupying one-eighth the space required for traditional servers, Moonshot is not only going to minimise the energy required to power the ever-growing server farms, but will similarly require less and less space to house them all.

“Testing results show that with Moonshot servers we can expect to run hp.com, with the energy equivalency of a dozen 60-watt light bulbs, which is a game changer,” said John Hinshaw, executive vice president, Technology and Operations, HP. “We also plan to deploy Moonshot for additional applications to lead the next wave of transformation in the data center.”

Speaking to the need for such innovations, Chris Hill, the principal research engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-chair of the Research and Education Subcommittee for Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing spoke highly of Moonshot:

Faced with constraints for energy efficiency and analytic compute capacity to support world-leading geosciences research, we absolutely require technological innovations from leading companies like HP. Innovations such as HP Moonshot are providing us with confidence that infrastructure can continue to scale out to support fundamentally insatiable requirements—all with less energy, a smaller footprint, increased integration and lower cost.

The Moonshot is available in the US and Canada and will be available throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America beginning this month. Pricing begins at $61,875 for the enclosure, 45 HP ProLiant Moonshot servers and an integrated switch.