HP today
took direct aim at the ever-increasing costs of data centers and managing an
explosion of data by
announcing a new generation of automated and efficient hardware. The new generation of
ProLiant servers includes better internal management, powerful automation features, and improved energy conservation.
The
ProLiant Gen8 servers are part
HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy, and represent the first step

in the company's
Project Voyager, a two-year, $300-million effort to redefine the economics of the
data center. At the heart of the new generation of servers is ProActive Insight architecture, which includes integrated lifecycle automation, dynamic workload acceleration, automated energy optimization, and proactive service and support. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of
BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Data has become a differentiator in business, and with an ever-expanding growth in storage needs, enterprises are feeling the pinch in personnel costs, energy, and facilities. Supporting data as a lifecycle may be IT's fastest growing cost worldwide.
Analysts now predict a 45 percent annual increase in storage over the next three years, and the current annual costs associated with storage are estimated at $157 billion. In addition, server administration and operations cost three times the price of servers, while the cost of facilities to accommodate the data center is even higher.
“The skyrocketing cost of operations in the data center is unsustainable, and enterprises are looking to HP to help solve this problem,” said Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager, Industry standard Servers and Software, HP. “We are delivering innovative intelligence technologies that enable servers to virtually take care of themselves, allowing data center staff to devote more time to business innovation.”
Integrated lifecycle management
Incorporating three major innovations, Integrated Lifecycle Automation simplifies common tasks to keep systems running at peak performance, with an estimated 93 percent less
downtime during updates than with previous generations, said HP. These innovations include:
Dynamic workload acceleration The demand for data-intensive and transactional workloads such as
data warehousing, real-time
analytics, and
virtualized environments is expanding dramatically. These workloads bring unpredictability to the data center requiring a fundamental change in the way compute and storage services integrate.
HP's Gen8 servers aim to reduce and in some cases eliminate bottlenecks by converging compute and storage services through three innovations:
Automated energy optimization
Ensuring that data center capacity will meet growing workload requirements is critical. However, constraints on physical space, rising
power demands, and limits on available cooling are adversely affecting data center capacity. In many organizations IT managers are struggling to get what they need from existing resources without inadvertently causing downtime.
The Gen8 servers enable data center and IT managers to identify the physical location of each server in the
rack, row and data center. This insight, combined with a sea of intelligent sensors embedded into each server, allows users to reduce power requirements, reclaim as much as 10 percent more usable power per circuit and eliminate manual configuration and tracking errors that can increase downtime.
The Gen8 servers enable data center and IT managers to identify the physical location of each server in the rack, row and data center.
Three new features automate energy optimization in the data center so users can:
- Optimize workload placement with Location Discovery Services and eliminate labor-intensive and error-prone tracking of IT assets
- Reduce energy use and increase power capacity with Thermal Discovery Services, which improve airflow efficiency by as much as 25 percent with an intelligent server rack meaning that enterprises can realize an estimated energy saving of $2,750 per 10kW rack
- Increase system uptime with Power Discovery Services, which automatically track power usage per rack and server, eliminating errors and manual record keeping to reduce unplanned data center outages
Partner program HP says the new servers will also be a
boon to participants in the
Partner Program, because partners can expand their service portfolio, increase partner touchpoints, enhance remote technical capabilities, and create consultative opportunities over the life of the customer’s solution.
Further, by eliminating manual processes and the potential of human error, HP and channel partners can reduce outages, while focusing IT resources on strategic tasks. Specifically, partners can:
ProLiant Gen8 servers are available to early-adopter clients today. General availability begins in March and continues throughout 2012. This includes
ProLiant ML tower servers for remote and branch offices and versatile
ProLiant DLrack-mount servers that deliver a balance of efficiency and performance. Also included are
ProLiant BL blade servers for cloud-ready Converged Infrastructure and ProLiant SL scalable system servers built for web, cloud and massively scaled environments.
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