Veronica A. Escalante, Category Manager, Industry Standard Servers (ISS), HP Philippines, is excited about the road ahead and the future of server technology. In this interview, Veronica shares details on the recently launched HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers, the world’s most self-sufficient servers, and says that the new line of servers have laid the foundation for multiple generations of server technology to follow.
Q: What are the current challenges that enterprises face when it comes to server technology?
A: Today, the demand for data and content is growing at a breathtaking rate and traditional server infrastructure has become a constrained resource that is impacting business growth for enterprises. The volume and frequency of server management tasks, error alerts and installations are increasing expenses, resource allocation and complexity in the infrastructure, costing organizations nearly $157 billion in 2012, according to IDC. Consider these numbers:
- Companies spend on average $24 million over three years on manual operations just to support servers;
- Growing server energy and facilities expenses cost companies up to $29 million over three years;
- And, unplanned downtime costs clients approximately $10 million an hour.
Frankly, those are costs are unsustainable in the long run. And at HP, we sent a wakeup call to the industry with multi-year initiatives. We were able to foresee ‘cloud’ and the ‘information explosion’ coming and we embarked on a three-phase plan to transform server technology and redefine data center economics.
Q: Project Moonshot, Project Odyssey and Project Voyageur …?
A: Yes, exactly. In November 2011, we announced Project Moonshot, which changed how servers are built for extreme low energy computing. That same month, we announced Project Odyssey, phase two of our plan, which redefined mission-critical computing by unifying the UNIX and x86 architectures on a single platform. And earlier this year, we announced Project Voyageur. The culmination of our three-phase plan to transform the server industry and redefine data center economics by automating every aspect of the server life cycle.
For decades, IT systems have been getting incrementally faster, smaller, and more affordable. In the cloud era, they need to become infinitely more intelligent. And this goal is at the heart of Project Voyager, a two-year, $300 million HP engineering and development initiative to eliminate many manual tasks across the IT lifecycle. Through this initiative, HP is fundamentally redefining the expectations and economics of the data center by creating systems so intelligent they virtually take care of themselves. The next generation of the HP ProLiant server family is the first step on this far-reaching mission.
Q: What makes Generation 8 of the ProLiant servers so unique?
A: With intelligent technologies that automate tasks and significantly improve uptime, HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers address the most costly and complex issues faced by IT departments. HP ProLiant is now the industry’s most self-sufficient line of servers that delivers a return-on-investment in as little as five months, while tripling admin productivity.
- HP ProLiant Gen8 triples administrator productivity by eliminating most manual operations such as server updates, which typically take five hours of administrator time per rack of servers. The industry-first HP Smart Update feature can perform the same update in 10 minutes or less.
- HP ProLiant Gen8 features HP 3-D Sea of Sensors, an industry-first technology that identifies overutilized servers based on real-time location, power, workload and temperature data, increasing compute capacity per watt of energy by 70 percent. HP 3-D Sea of Sensors also automates energy efficiency while eliminating 100 percent of manual configuration and inventory process errors.
With industry-first HP Active Health and HP Insight Online technologies, HP ProLiant Gen8 is the only server that automatically analyzes its own health across 1,600 data points. Through self monitoring, self diagnosing and proactive support, clients can resolve unplanned downtime issues up to 66 percent faster.
Q: Does this new line of servers cater to industry requirements – virtualization and the cloud?
A: Absolutely! The HP ProLiant Gen8 servers have been engineered for virtual environments and the cloud. In today’s data centers, small advances in technology won’t solve the big problems. To respond effectively to exploding demand for applications, data, and digital content, your IT organization needs intelligent technology built for the challenges of the cloud era.
To accelerate virtualized and data intensive application performance, HP engineers balanced the system architecture while unifying storage, I/O and compute resources to create the industry’s most converged system platform to date. The comprehensive portfolio of HP ProLiant Gen8 servers include:
- HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8, the world’s leading server blade, is ideal for a data center’s transition to the cloud;
- HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8, versatile, rack-optimized server that offers high performance, efficiency and reliability in a 1U space;
- HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8, supports the broadest spectrum of workloads and provides for future scalability as needs change;
- HP ProLiant ML350p Gen8, expandable tower server well suited for remote and branch offices;
- HP ProLiant SL230s Gen8, a multi-node server for maximum performance of high density scale-out and High Performance Computing (HPC) environments;
- HP ProLiant SL250s Gen8, ideal for heterogeneous and custom data centers focused on graphics processing unit (GPU) computing;
- HP ProLiant DL160 Gen8, ultra-dense rack server designed for web serving and memory-intensive applications.
With an unprecedented set of innovations, the new ProLiant family provides the heart and mind of a self-aware and intelligent converged infrastructure. In this new world of IT, servers are so intelligent they eliminate tedious, time-consuming tasks. They converge storage, compute, and I/O to turbo-charge application performance. They maximize the use of space, power, and cooling. They redefine the service experience. And they fit naturally into your environment because they were designed for the way you work. From core to cloud, HP is transforming the expectations and economics of the data center with the world’s most self-sufficient servers.