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HP's Project Voyager gains speed with self-sufficient servers

HP has unveiled the next phase of Project Voyager, a venture designed to "redefine the economics and expectations of data center operations in the cloud era."

Written by Rachel King on Feb. 13, 2012

Hewlett-Packard is announcing that its Project Voyager initiative is finally paying off with the debut of its new ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers for enterprise customers

Boasted as "the world’s most self-sufficient line of servers," the Gen8 servers with HP's ProActive Insight hardware and software architecture designed to deliver server life-cycle automation, continuous intelligence on server health, power usage and other diagnostics.

Thus, the configuration is touted to deploy online system updates at least three times faster with 93 percent less downtime.

Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Industry standard Servers and Software unit, explained in prepared remarks the inspiration and goals behind Gen8 as well as Project Voyager:

The skyrocketing cost of operations in the data center is unsustainable, and enterprises are looking to HP to help solve this problem. 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.

Here's a glance at a few of the more than 150 client-designed innovations to be seen on the ProLiant Gen8 servers:

Enable IT staff to save over 30 days of administration time a year per person in an average 10,000 square-foot data center
Improve data-intensive storage performance by approximately seven times with a converged server
Saving $7 million in energy costs in a single data center over three years while delivering roughly double compute-per-watt capacity
Dubbed as the "only server that automatically analyzes its own health across 1,600 data points," so it can enable clients to resolve unplanned downtime periods up to 66 percent faster

Project Voyager, which launched in November to "automates every aspect of the server life cycle," is actually the third installment in HP's roadmap to transform the server market. The first two missions, Project Moonshot and Odyssey, tackled building servers for extremely low-energy computing and mission critical computing, respectively.

HP ProLiant Gen8 servers are available through an early-adopter program starting today, and general availability worldwide launches in March.

Image via Hewlett-Packard