HP takes the battle to Cisco with new servers and software

HP has just launched a swathe of servers in multiple form factors — rack, blade and tower — driven by Intel’s latest processor architecture, codenamed Nehalem.

But there’s much more to it than that.

Time was when server companies, especially those such as HP, which analysts say has the biggest server market share, would boast and brag about how theirs were the biggest and fastest beasts in the jungle.

No longer. Instead, HP put heavy emphasis on its management capabilities. That’s a shot fired across the bows of network vendor Cisco, which just two weeks ago unveiled a new unified computing initiative, at whose core is a scheme to manage and automate the movement of virtual machines and applications across servers inside data centres. Oh yes, there’s a server in there too — a first for fast-diversifying Cisco.

But this is a sidetrack: back to HP’s launch of the ProLiant G6. Performance was mentioned once in the press release’s opening paragraph — they’re twice as quick, apparently — but when he spoke to me, European server VP Christian Keller focused almost entirely on manageability, and performance per watt.

“We have 32 senders that give health information about temperatures and hotspots. Unlike our competitors, we don’t just control all six fans together -- we can control them separately using advanced algorithms. These are based on computational fluid dynamics and are based in a chip, so it works even if the OS is changing -- for example during virtualisation moves,” he said.

Keller went on to talk about how the servers’ power draw can be capped, again using hardware-based algorithms, which means that a server that’s been over-specified for the purposes of future-proofing won’t draw more power than it needs.

The result, Keller went on, is that “you can use the data centre better and pack more servers into the same space.” The bottom line is that the organisation reaps big total cost of ownership savings, he reckoned, although with finance very tight, he said that quick payback was at the top of mind of his customers.

“Customers are looking for faster payback today due to recession,” he said. “With HP, you need fewer servers to do the same amount of work and payback is achieved in around 12 months.” And there’s a bunch of slideware to back up his claims. You can get more on the products here.