Hewlett-Packard is taking a step away from traditional server design with the new Proliant SL4500 server, which mixes processing, networking, and storage units to optimize performance of applications like OpenStack and Hadoop.
HP claims that its new HP ProLiant SL4500 server offers an efficient design that consumes significanty less space, power and lower cost compared to other systems, while it has also fewer cables. It's modular design allows for optimization of infrastructure for a workload-specific application.
The HP ProLiant SL4500 server series supports multiple Apache Hadoop vendors including Cloudera and Hortonworks, as well as additional software including OpenStack Cloud Software and MongoDB.
Based on the HP Smart Array technology, the server promises to deliver performance with a nearly seven times faster input/output operations per second (IOPS) than existing HDD-based architectures. In addition, with the smart analytics of HP SmartCache, the system will optimize storage traffic to ensure the lowest latency response.
The new HP ProLiantSL4500 server series is delivering storage density of up to 240 terabytes (TB) in a single 4.3-rack-unit (U) chassis, or 2.16 petabytes (PB) with nine servers in an industry-standard 42-U rack.
The latest member of the HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) family is also built with HP ProActive Insight Architecture, which embeds intelligence and automation capabilities. These include:
- Automated data protection and HP Predictive Spare Activation, which moves data to an alternate device before failures occur.
- HP Active Health and automated firmware updates with HP Smart Update.
- HP Intelligent Infrastructure, which lowers data center power costs and improve compute per watt.
The HP ProLiant SL4500 server series in a single node configuration is available immediately worldwide for a starting price of $7,643.
HP also announced updates to its high-performance computing (HPC) portfolio offering configurations powered by the latest processing technology from Intel and NVIDIA.
The HP ProLiant SL270s Gen8 server supports up to eight Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors or eight NVIDIA Kepler graphic processing units (GPUs) per server. The HP ProLiant SL270s and SL250s Gen8 servers now support the latest NVIDIA Kepler GPUs and newly announced Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.
The new HP ProLiant SL270s Gen8 servers will be available next month, with for a starting price of $6,166. The HP ProLiant SL250s Gen8 servers will be available with NVIDIA Kepler and Intel Xeon Phi processors early next year for a starting price of $5,659.