HP roll outs self-sufficient ProLiant Gen8
MANILA, Philippines—After two years of research under Project Voyager and roughly 900 patents filed, Hewlett-Packard on Thursday unveiled its most ambitious product yet, ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8).
Boasted as the industry’s most self-sufficient line of servers ever to hit the market, Gen8 servers are the result of the $300 million project and is HP’s way of revolutionizing the server market.
“HP has always been a leader in providing infrastructure (and) we want to go back to where we were as an infrastructure provider… cutting across (our) PC, laptop, (and) printer product line,” said Ryan Guadalquiver, managing director and enterprise business general manager for HP Philippines Corporation.
“We are trying to define the future in server technology.”
And as what leaders ought to be doing, HP has continued to innovate throughout the 22 years of being the leading provider of servers—with their Gen8 server line which will prove useful whether the clients are small and medium businesses, data center providers or large enterprises, HP Philippines Corp. category manager Veronica Escalante added.
Citing a study during the press conference for Gen8 server line, Escalante pointed out that for a period of three years, a typical 10,000 sq. ft. data center costs a company some $24 million just for its manual operations, added to that $29 million more for not being efficient in energy use, plus $10 million per hour of downtime due to server errors.
“This is not sustainable in the long run,” she surmised, explaining that data on server errors and failures prompted HP to embark on multi-generation missions starting with Project Moonshot which sought to change the way servers were designed and have their products reduce energy consumption. This was followed by Project Odyssey which sought to redefine mission critical computing.
Project Voyager, HP’s most recent and boldest ever research which produced Gen8, “redefines expectations on data centers through extensive use of automation technology. (It seeks to) automate where possible and lessen manual tasks,” said Escalante.
“We are delivering innovative intelligence technologies that enable servers to virtually take care of themselves, allowing data center staff to devote more time to business innovation.”
This project also came up with the HP Proactive Insight Architecture which seeks to deliver server life cycle automation by combining an important mix of hardware and software.
Sascha Haake, business unit manager of Blades Industry Standard Servers for Asia Pacific and Japan, said that in Project Voyager they “thought about how much time and mistakes can be made while configuring servers” and came up with Gen8, a system which he said was intelligent enough to know what needs updating or what may be going wrong.
In creating Gen8’s built-in system administrator, Jerry Domingo, HP’s country manager for technology solutions, disclosed that they “gathered all the (previous) defects and tried to understand what the root causes of failure were. We came up with an improvement plan and integrated it with the (Gen8) servers.”
In fact, Domingo said that the remote support Gen8 provided was a service currently unique to HP.
Escalante explained that Gen8, being the third phase in HP’s three-phase plan to change the game of the server market, employed some of the latest technology which can be found in their earlier Gen6 and Gen7 lines but can be differentiated through the four pillars of innovation the IT giant considered in producing its self-efficient server line: integrated lifecycle automation, dynamic workload acceleration, automated energy optimization, and proactive service and support.
She further elaborated that the integrated lifecycle automation provided clients with fast set-up and ease in maintaining servers; dynamic workload acceleration ensured improved performance and technology with six times more in performance gain; automated energy optimization enabled 70 percent more performance per watt while the proactive service and support will provide clients with 66 percent faster resolution time through HP Insight Online, its cloud-based management tool.
HP Insight Remote Support under the said management tool, she said, enables the Gen8 servers to directly contact HP in case of failures. “It will not wait for the customer. Once they allow (remote support), they will be enrolled online (and can check their servers’) warranty and status.”
According to Domingo, one the server prompts HP of a problem it will also send all needed logs which saves their engineers from having to make a trip to the client’s office to retrieve them. “It saves a lot of time” and allows engineers to find out what the problem is.
Making remote support easily accessible to its clients, Escalante said that a VPN connection was no longer necessary to receive support service as it is being delivered via cloud. “They can be anywhere in the world… and can even use smartphones to check their server’s status.”
Gen8 was really centered on the needs of its clients, according to Domingo who told reporters that in producing Gen8 they not only “reinforced our strategy integrating product development but also our services component.”
“Customers will realize return of investment within 5 months,” promised Escalante.
Having just launched Gen8 in the region, Escalante said that they were “positive that local clients will adopt this.”
