HP has designed a new portfolio of hardware, software and services, aimed at reducing costs and saving resources, particularly for businesses involved in Web 2.0, cloud and high-performance computing.
Targeting business models where thousands of servers are needed, HP’s Extreme Scale-Out (ExSO) portfolio make use of lighter and more modular hardware to help companies drive down costs, improve facility efficiency, and reduce time to market. According to HP, a 100,000 sq ft (9,290 sq m) data centre can save more than US$152.8 million in reduced capital expenditures and US$13.7 million in energy costs.
“Customers with scale-out business models need solutions that make every dollar, watt and square foot in the data centre count,” said Stephen Bovis, vice president and general manager, industry standard servers, technology solutions group, HP Asia Pacific and Japan. “HP offers pioneering customers like these the most significant design innovation since the blade form factor, allowing them to achieve an economy of scale never before possible.”
At the core of the ExSO portfolio are the HP ProLiant SL servers, which use an architecture that consolidates power and cooling infrastructure, using 28 per cent less power per server than traditional rack-based servers, resulting in a savings of up to US$4.1 million a year in energy costs.
The reductions in the metal used in the new ProLiant SL servers decreases weight by 31 per cent and reduces shipping costs, data centre floor support requirements and overall facility construction costs.
The servers also have modular configurations for rapid installation and deployment through swappable ‘compute trays’. This new architecture doubles traditional density with up to 672 processor cores and 10 terabytes of capacity per 42U rack.
All these add up to reduced cost-to-scale which significantly reduces acquisition costs for customers who require thousands of server nodes, adding up to savings in capital expenditure of up to US$14.5 million in a scale-out data centre.
“Businesses built on extreme scale-out environments, such as cloud, Web 2.0 and HPC, operate at maximum transaction volume and low margins,” said Michelle Bailey, research vice president, IDC. “These customers have very distinct and unique data center requirements, specifically around energy efficiency, cost and time to market. The introduction of technology solutions such as the ExSO portfolio are specifically addressing customer requirements for optimising capitol expenditures while lowering ongoing operating costs. As a result, these solutions are helping to redefine data centre economics.”
