Hewlett Packard (HP), last week made headlines when it took the wraps off what it claims to be “the world’s first” two-in-one server blade designed to offer scale-out customers improved data center performance, reduced space requirements, lower power usage and ultimately cost savings.
The Intel® Xeon®-based HP ProLiant BL2x220c G5 combines two independent servers in a single blade. With its two-in-one design, the blade is said to deliver double the compute performance and memory capacity of traditional server blades and has the capability of drawing 30% less power consumption and 40% more efficiency.
At an Asia Pacific media brief, HP’s director of BladeSystem, Scalable Computing and Infrastructure, Arun Natarajan ensured journalists that since both servers work independently from each other, should one server falter, the second server will not be affected in any way. He also tackled the popular question of cooling, stating that the new tool will use HP Active Cool Fan to address that issue.
The new blade is part of a holistic initiative—including products and services-- that HP has embarked on to address emerging pain points as businesses are increasingly delving into technologies such as Web 2.0, High Performance Computing (HPC) and cloud computing for their business requisites.
“As business requirements rapidly change and digital media files grow at exponential rates, many enterprises need to manage growth in a way that helps them profit from their storage infrastructure,” said Jim Wagstaff, vice president and general manager, StorageWorks Division, Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific and Japan
According to HP, new business services offered by Web 2.0 and digital media firms—such as photo sharing, streaming media, video-on-demand and social networking—generate massive amounts of file-based data that needs to be stored, managed and retrieved in an instant.
The computer behemoth also said that it has seen similar demands from large enterprise in sectors such as oil and gas, security and surveillance and genetic research.
Other target markets would be the online gaming industry, which is becoming increasingly popular, especially in the Asian region, requiring huge computing farms to support games as well as other non traditional customers such as financial services and animation companies.
“Many companies are struggling with file-based growth—not only how to cope with the sheer growth, but also how to leverage their digital and static media to create additional revenue by delivering online services,” said Mark Peters an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
“HP is aiming to address these dual market needs, which are much more than just petabyte scalability at an affordable price.
“Customers are looking for systems that combine scalability with simplified management, ease of sue, and all-in-one application support. Put very simply, new business models require usability as much as storability.”
Other offerings under this umbrella include the recently announced HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100) which is a highly scalable storage system designed to simplify the management of multiple petabytes of data at an affordable cost.
As part of its services offerings, HP has also revealed the HP Data Center Transformation suite of services that aims to improve operational efficiency and lower costs by aligning scale-out data center strategies with business goals. These services address all scale-out data center domains, including facilities, networks and process management.
Parallel to this announcement, HP also revealed that it has formed a new business unit – the HP Scalable Computing & Infrastructure organization --- to focus on delivering products and solutions tailored to the unique needs of Web 2.0, high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud computing customers.
The new organization combines existing resources from the company’s HPC organization with its Scaleable Datacenter Infrastructure team.
HP said it plans to unveil its approach for taking the data center to new levels of disaster recoverability, flexibility and power efficiency in the coming months. |
