Enterprise Tech
HP Shoots for the Moon With a New, Smaller Server
By Ashlee Vance April 08, 2013
Hewlett-Packard
(HPQ) just had its most innovative moment in
years. How do we know this? Well, the company has ushered forth a new creation
under the Project Moonshoot banner, created a scripted webcast to accompany the
product, and even had guys who would normally wear suits dress down in sports
coats and jeans to model the product, thus underscoring its hipness.
HP has built is
a new server—the HP Moonshot 1500. It’s special because it runs on Intel’s (INTC) low-power Atom chips, which usually go into
mobile devices. As a result, HP has been able to design an entire computer
server that’s about the size of an envelope and then pack hundreds of these
together into a single system that basically functions as an ultracompact
supercomputer. According to HP’s stats, the new server uses 89 percent less
energy, takes up 80 percent less space, and costs 77 percent less than more
traditional server designs.
The HP Moonshot
1500 both is and isn’t revolutionary. To its credit, HP has pushed compact
server designs to the extreme and crammed an awful lot of computing power in a
small amount of space. This type of system has been designed for Web and cloud
computing companies that tend to buy thousands upon thousands of servers and
need them to run as efficiently as possible. By using smartphone/tablet chips
instead of beefier server chips, HP has provided a product that can handle the
lightweight task of feeding up Web pages without consuming a lot of
electricity. (Such a server would not be as well suited to, say, processing
millions of transactions or large calculations.)
The problem
here is that most of the Web giants, such as Amazon.com (AMZN), Facebook (FB), Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), already design their own servers and have
an Asian contract manufacturer produce them. So HP is to some degree catering
to a market that it has already lost to lower-cost rivals.
HP, though,
might have a strong play if you look longer term. It’s basically betting that
more traditional companies will come to want and need similar computing systems
as the Web giants. HP has developed its own networking, storage, and software
technology to make the Moonshot 1500 operate well as a collective whole, so
that customers without a ton of internal engineering expertise can still use
such a complex system.
What’s more, HP
plans to bring out systems later this year that use ARM-based chips from such
companies as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and the startup Calxeda. Today, ARM chips
dominate the smartphone and tablet markets, but they’ve been considered too
low-powered and flimsy for use in data centers. A number of chip makers are
trying to change that by creating higher-end versions of ARM that still run at
low power and cost less than Intel chips, while offering such features as error
checking that customers expect to see with infrastructure equipment.
There’s lots of
experimentation going on with these ARM-based systems, but HP now stands as the
most vocal supporter of the technology among the top-tier server sellers.
Overall, HP wants to convey that it’s an
innovator again. During the webcast celebrating the release of the Moonshot
system, HP executives went to great lengths to talk about how daring and bold
the company was. Along these lines, the new server seems to be a step in the
right direction
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