Hewlett-Packard said its first “Generation 2″ Project Moonshot server, based on Intel’s( intc) Atom Series 1200 chip is available as of Monday with other versions running chips from Calxeda, AMD, Applied Microand Texas Instruments to come.
The goal of Project Moonshot, as initially stated last year, is to offer a super energy-efficient and compact servers capable of running the world’s biggest webscale (and biggest enterprises) at a fraction of the cost. HP said it shipped a number of early versions for customer proofs of concept last year but today’s news represents broad availability of what HP execs called a ”software-defined server designed for the data center.”
The new server puts 4,500 Proliant servers in one HP 1500 enclosure. Compared to traditional Proliant servers, this iteration uses 89 percent less energy, 80 percent less space and is 97 percent less complex than the former state of the art at 77 percent less cost.
It’s understandable given HP’s huge server installed base in enterprises why it lays out that comparison, but companies might be more interested in how Moonshot boxes compare with webscale servers from what used to be no-name rivals like Quanta, Inventec, Quanta. The notion of BYO servers is also spreading. In January, Rackspace the big hosting and cloud provider, for exmaple, said it would start building its own servers.
That trend puts traditional server vendors like HP, Dell and IBM in a tough spot. It’s good to see HP willing to cannibalize its installed base., the question is whether those big web-scale workloads have already set sail on no-name servers.
I will update this story as needed throughout rest of today’s HP web conference.
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