HP today unveiled the industry’s first server built to help clients operationalize Big Data, drive new business opportunities and save up to $1 million over three years.⁽¹⁾

HP ProLiant SL45402 Gen 8 (Photo: Business Wire)

With the advent of Big Data software and the promise that it brings, many organizations have tried to deploy these solutions on existing architectures not designed to handle the specific needs of these workloads. As a result, the outcomes from these early deployments have been suboptimal from a performance and cost perspective.

“Big Data application environments such as Hadoop, MPP data warehouses, Big Data analytics and object stores have very different workload requirements,” said Dan Vesset, vice president, Business Analytics Research, IDC. “Given the large and varied amounts of fast-moving data that needs to be stored and accessed quickly and the different requirements of end users, these workloads can be highly varied, complex and inefficient to manage if run on traditional hardware infrastructure. In order to fully embrace the promise of Big Data, it is critical that the underlying infrastructure be optimized for the workload.”

The new HP ProLiant SL4500 server series is the only solution purpose built for Big Data environments. It provides maximum performance, productivity and cost-effectiveness in an ultradense solution required by these workloads. Built on HP Converged Infrastructure, the new server offers a highly efficient design that consumes up to 50 percent less space, 61 percent less power and 31 percent lower cost while using 63 percent fewer cables.⁽¹⁾

Modular architecture optimizes results for workload specific applications

The modular design of the HP ProLiant SL4500 server series offers varied compute and storage configurations that enable clients to optimize their infrastructure for a workload-specific application, removing the need to piece together incongruent hardware for the supporting infrastructure.

With a single, cost-effective architecture, the HP ProLiant SL4500 server series also supports multiple Apache Hadoop vendors including Cloudera and Hortonworks, as well as additional software including OpenStack Cloud Software and MongoDB.

“Enterprises that leverage Cloudera’s Platform for Big Data to unlock insights across all of their data benefit from deploying infrastructure components optimized for the extreme demands of Big Data workloads,” said Amr Awadallah, chief technology officer, Cloudera. “By designing a server purpose built for Big Data, HP is offering the market a seamless new approach to processing large data sets efficiently and cost-effectively.”

HP innovation delivers greater performance and density

The HP ProLiant SL4500 Gen8 server series, with HP Smart Array technology, delivers industry-leading performance with a nearly seven times faster input/output operations per second (IOPS) than existing architectures.⁽²⁾ With the smart analytics of HP SmartCache, the system will optimize storage traffic to ensure the lowest latency response and up-front investment.

Current server offerings cannot address the rapidly growing amounts of storage and servers for Big Data, forcing IT leaders to acquire additional expensive data center space. However, the new HP ProLiantSL4500 server series solves this problem by delivering industry-leading storage density of up to 240 terabytes (TB) in a single 4.3-rack-unit (U) chassis, or 2.16 petabytes (PB) with nine servers in an industry-standard 42-U rack.⁽³⁾

As a result of this extreme density, clients realize significant cost savings, greater performance and increased efficiency.

Safeguard Big Data, simplify management and support with HP ProLiant Gen8

The latest member of the HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) family, the HP SL4500 server series is built with HP ProActive Insight Architecture, which embeds intelligence and automation capabilities allowing clients to:

• Eliminate down time and safeguard valuable data with automated data protection and HP Predictive Spare Activation, which moves data to an alternate device before failures occur.
• Ensure maximum server productivity with HP Active Health, and automate firmware updates with HP Smart Update.
• Leverage the industry’s most comprehensive services, support and warranty offering with HP Insight Online.
• Lower data center power costs and improve compute per watt by up to 70 percent than previous generations with HP Intelligent Infrastructure.⁽⁴⁾

HP enhances scale-out server portfolio

HP also announced updates to its high-performance computing (HPC) portfolio, enabling clients to maximize the performance benefits of the latest processing technology from Intel and NVIDIA.

The HP ProLiant SL270s Gen8 server offers maximized processor density, with the ability to support up to eight Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors or eight NVIDIA® Kepler™ graphic processing units (GPUs) per server. The HP ProLiant SL270s and SL250s Gen8 servers now support the latest NVIDIA Kepler GPUs and newly announced Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, enabling clients to select the best accelerator or coprocessor for their specific workloads.

Pricing and availability⁽⁵⁾

The HP ProLiant SL4500 server series in a single node configuration is available immediately worldwide for a starting price of $7,643.

The new HP ProLiant SL270s Gen8 servers will be available next month, with for a starting price of $6,166. The HP ProLiant SL250s Gen8 servers will be available with NVIDIA Kepler and Intel Xeon Phi processors early next year for a starting price of $5,659.

HP’s premier Europe, Middle East and Africa client event, HP Discover, takes place Dec. 4-6 in Frankfurt, Germany.

About HP

HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

(1) Based on internal calculations comparing Dell PowerEdge R510 servers plus four units of Dell Power Vault MD1200 direct attach storage, which consumes seven racks, 28 servers, 112 JBOD (just a bunch of disks) enclosures, 14 networking switches, 448 cables and 79 kilowatts of power to HP ProLiant SL4500 servers consuming three racks, six networking switches, 168 cables and 31 kilowatts of power. Savings of $0.5M in acquisition costs (or CAPEX); $0.25M savings in power, cooling and distribution costs; and $0.2M savings due to rent of data center floor space over a three-year period.

(2) Based on internal testing that compares an HP ProLiant G7 server with a standard 15K SAS drive to that of HP ProLiant Gen8 server with a solid state drive.

(3) Based on internal calculations. Single-node configuration of HP SL4500 server is capable of providing up to 60 LFF (3.5-inch) SAS/SATA/SSD hard drives in a 4.3U chassis. Using the 4TB SAS/SATA hard drives that will be available early FY2013, every SL4500 server can provide 240 TB of storage capacity. A total of up to nine SL4500 servers can be installed in a single 42U rack to provide a maximum storage capacity of 2.16PB by using 540 LFF hard drives of 4TB capacity.

(4) HP internal comparison: HP ProLiant G7 to HP ProLiant G8.

(5) Estimated U.S. street prices. Actual prices may vary.

Intel and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.

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