It took NASA a decade to put a man on the moon, and return him safely to the Earth. It took Hewlett-Packard Co. about a year to develop its Moonshot server.
With a starting price of just over US$60,000, customers can get their hands on what HP is designing as a “hyperscale” class of servers that will use 89 per cent less energy and use 80 per cent less space than traditional servers, all while costing 77 per cent less. It’s designed for what HP calls the “mega deta centre” which, according to the vendor, can scale no further with traditional 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 CEO, in a statement. “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.”
According, to HP, Moonshot is designed to tackle the IT challenges created by the social, cloud, mobile and big data trends. Using Intel’s Atom processors (an ARM version may also be in the works) helps deliver the improvements in footprint, energy usage and cost.
The HP Moonshot system includes the HP Moonshot 1500 enclosure and ProLiant Moonshot servers, with each server able to target a specific workload. The first ProLiant MoonShot Server uses the Intel Atom S1200 processor and supports web hosting workloads. It’s available now in Canada and the U.S. starting at $61,875, and includes the enclosure, 45 ProLiant Moonshot servers and an integrated switch.