HP releases Project moonshot Super scale server next week

As part of HP Project Moonshot, HP will launch a large scale server next week. HP's project moonshot is to build high-density low-power servers that can quickly upgrade performance.

Hewlett-Packard issued an invitation this Tuesday morning, saying that HP will hold a webcast launch of the project Moonshot platform on April 8. HP CEO Whitman (Meg Whitman) and Hewlett-Packard executive vice president and Business Department general manager Dave Donatli (Dave Donatelli) will attend the product launch.

The launch of Project moonshot is the result of a nearly 1.5-time experiment with HP's Low-power servers designed for large scale environments. Project Moonshot was first launched by HP in November 2011. The server was originally designed with an ARM server and later extended to a high-density server with Intel's Low-power-driven processors. The prototype product for this server has been provided to specific users for testing. The final product launch has been postponed many times.

HP wants to reduce the power consumption and footprint of new servers. The target applications of this server are large data centers that handle Internet traffic and cloud applications. Companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon have built large data centers and added thousands of servers a day to handle the growing number of Web sites and Internet requests.

With Low-power servers, HP focuses more on delivering information faster than on processing capacity. Whitman said last month that the Project's moonshot platform would reduce power consumption by 89%, footprint by 94% and cost less than the traditional x86 server environment by 63%.

Hewlett-Packard said in a case study that a moonshot server device cost 1.2 million dollars and only half of the rack space. Electricity consumption is 9.9 kw. The Lunar server device will replace the traditional server device, which is priced at $3.3 million, including 1600 servers, and consumes 91-kilowatt per hour.

The moonshot server will be another product of HP's current server type. HP's current server product line includes ProLiant GEN8 vertical, rack-and blade servers, and nonstop servers that perform important tasks. HP is also making modular data centers and servers that perform specific workloads for data centers and cloud computing.

HP says the moonshot server will not rely on any architecture to support the Intel Ling processor and ARM processor. The first moonshot server may support Intel's S1200 processor. HP did not comment further on the news.

Companies that choose to use ARM servers must work with HP to edit the code of the application, according to Del Prete, vice president of market research firm IDC.

(Responsible editor: Fumingli)