HP starts shipping new Gen8 Servers

Industry News Tue 3rd, Apr 2012 by Dave Simpson
General availability of HP ProLiant Gen8 servers through Softcat begins early April and continues throughout 2012. This includes HP ProLiant ML tower servers for remote and branch offices and versatile HP ProLiant DL rack-mount servers that deliver a balance of efficiency and performance. Also included are HP ProLiant BL blade servers for cloud-ready Converged Infrastructure and HP ProLiant SL scalable system servers built for web, cloud and massively scaled environments.

HP has entirely redesigned the server experience in a drive to create a self-sufficient server line. HP are using this transition to radically enhance servers to virtually take care of themselves, so you can devote more time to business delivery as opposed to the server estate.

The current portfolio of HP ProLiant Gen8 servers include:

  • HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8, World’s leading server blade; ideal balance of performance, scalability, and expandability
  • HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8, Best-in-Class, performance driven compute and storage in 1U
  • HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8, Industry leading serviceability, expandability and flexibility in 2U; the no compromise datacenter standard & world’s number one selling server
  • HP ProLiant ML350p Gen8, Versatile business servers delivering best-in-class performance with maximum expandability
  • HP ProLiant SL230s Gen8, Maximum compute and I/O performance for dense HPC environments
  • HP ProLiant SL250s Gen8, Balanced CPU/GPU for extreme HPC applications

The servers are the first solutions resulting from Project Voyager, the company’s initiative to redefine the economics of data center operations by eliminating manual tasks and maximizing efficiencies, saving clients millions of dollars in operations costs in the average data center.

HP ProLiant Gen8 servers adapt to their environment in real time. By continuously analyzing thousands of system parameters, the servers optimise application performance and proactively improve uptime. In addition, automating manual tasks increases productivity, reduces errors and greatly simplifies operations for virtualised, cloud and other dynamic computing models.

Project Voyager is a $300 million, two-year research and development initiative to advance HP Converged Infrastructure. It is the third phase of HP’s multi-year transformation plan for the server market, which began in November 2011 with Project Moonshot. Moonshot changed how servers are built for extreme low energy computing. Project Odyssey, phase two, redefined the future of mission critical computing.

With phase three, Voyager, HP has forever changed the role of the server in the data center and the enterprise benefits they deliver.

HP ProActive Insight architecture elevates your experience

HP ProLiant Gen8 servers feature HP ProActive Insight architecture, powerful hardware and software that automate every aspect of the server life cycle. At the same time they provide continuous intelligence on server health, power usage and other important diagnostics. As a result, online systems updates can be deployed three times faster with as much as 93 percent less downtime.

Tested in more than 100 real-world data centers, HP ProLiant Gen8 servers are built with more than 150 client-inspired, design innovations that enable administrators to eliminate common problems that cause failures, downtime and data loss. These include:

  • Integrated Lifecycle Automation – reduces administrator time by as much as 69 percent during online updates.  Speeds deployment by three times with up to 45 percent reduction of manual steps. Additionally, continuous monitoring of system health improves uptime and speeds root-cause analysis by five times .
  • Dynamic Workload Acceleration – improves data-intensive storage performance by 100 times with a converged server and storage design that leverages solid-state technologies.  Smart analytics and workload-aware intelligence enable HP ProLiant Gen8 servers to adapt in real time to optimise system performance and efficiency. Unique HP Advanced Data Mirroring and smart algorithms ensure data is as much as 1,000 times safer, speeding Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) initialization by 95 percent.
  • Automated Energy Optimisation – eliminates power configuration errors and manual record keeping by precisely tracking power usage per rack and server. Featuring HP 3D Sea of Sensors, HP ProLiant Gen8 servers identify and inventory themselves which let administrators to easily optimise workload placement. Administrators also can identify over utilised servers based on real-time location, power, workload and temperature data, helping them to further reduce energy usage.
  • Proactive Service and Support – improves uptime by automating the support process with HP Insight Online, a cloud-based, IT management and personalised support portal that is integrated with HP Insight Remote Support and HP services. For the first time, clients receive a unified server management and support experience. Automatic collection of server assets, health, contract, warranty and support case information is available securely anywhere, anytime. Clients can choose to make this data available to Softcat via the HP ServiceOne program to further facilitate problem resolution, prevent problems from occurring and improve performance.

HP also is transforming customer expectations around service delivery by introducing new support capabilities for HP ProLiant Gen8 servers.