HP launches compute platforms and solutions for data-intensive workloads

HP has launched new and enhanced purpose-built Compute platforms and solutions designed to help customers leverage all data assets in order to drive business outcomes, such as faster decision making, improved operational efficiency and direct content monetization.

Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 4.9 billion connected “things” will be in use in 2015, up 30 percent from 2014 and will reach 25 billion by 2020. This will cause an exponential increase in the amount of data, each of which will have a distinct value to the business. As a result, the industry is seeing the emergence of new technologies and architectures – from open source data analytics and database platforms to in-memory databases – built to derive value from data and deliver business outcomes.

HP’s new Compute platforms have been tailored to meet the specific requirements of these data-intensive workloads. These platforms are purpose-built for a range of emerging technologies and applications including mass content storage, block and file storage, unstructured and real-time analytics, as well as simple and transactional databases.

The new and enhanced servers and solutions include: HP Apollo 2000; the HP Apollo 4000 Systems family; the HP Big Data Reference Architecture; HP Integrity Superdome X; and the HP ProLiant DL580, DL560 and BL660c Gen9 servers. These servers are designed to optimize capacity and performance scalability, flexibility and cost efficiency with unique designs that address data center space, power and cooling challenges.

“The ever-increasing volume, velocity and variety of data have stretched traditional server technologies beyond their limits – it needs a set of purpose-built compute platforms specifically designed to extract the maximum value of the data,” said Alain Andreoli, senior vice president and general manager, Servers Business Unit, HP. “HP is innovating the designs of its broad Compute portfolio to align it to specific workload needs in order to help customers deliver the most impactful business outcomes by using data in ways that was impossible in the past.”

HP offers a spectrum of Compute platforms and solutions so customers from small businesses to global enterprises can leverage their data to extract value. With this broad portfolio, customers can select the optimal server to address their application requirements, commensurate with growth objectives and without over-provisioning.

The solutions are augmented with HP services, as well as an extensive ecosystem of partner solutions and services.

Scale-out Compute
Scale-out workloads such as object and virtualized storage and ApacheTM Hadoop® require Compute platforms with performance scalability, density optimization, storage simplicity and configuration flexibility. HP addresses these requirements with a scale-out Compute portfolio that consists of the HP Apollo 2000 and 4000 systems as well as HP Moonshot.

The HP Apollo 2000 is the enterprise bridge to scale-out infrastructure. It is designed to deliver hyperscale efficiency and performance in traditional datacenters running general purpose and high performance workloads. The efficient, space-saving system comes in a familiar form factor that has the same rack dimensions, cabling, management and serviceability attributes of traditional 1U rack servers, so it can be introduced in a non-disruptive way. Additionally, up to four independent hot-pluggable servers in a standard 2U chassis enable customers to mix and match servers for workload optimization.

The HP Apollo 4000 Systems family includes three servers purpose-built for data-intensive workloads like Hadoop and big data analytics, in addition to object storage. This family offers a choice of capacity density, performance scalability with one and three nodes, and the flexibility to change the ratio of compute to storage to match workload requirements. It includes the industry’s densest 2U server in the HP Apollo 4200 with 28 large form factor (LFF) drives or 50 small form factor (SFF) drives.

Additionally, the HP Apollo 4510 offers a 4U chassis with one server node providing rack-scale storage server density with up to 5.44 Petabytes (PB) in 42U rack. The HP Apollo 4530 offers three servers nodes in a chassis, making it ideal for Hadoop-based analytics, which leverages three-copy data replication.

These solutions are supported by the HP Haven Big Data platform featuring HP Vertica as well as HP HyperScale Big Data Ecosystem partners, including Cleversafe, Cloudera, Hortonworks®, Microsoft and Scality. The solutions also support key open source projects like Ceph, OpenStack Swift and ApacheTM Hadoop®.
The HP Apollo 4000 servers, when combined with HP Moonshot, create the foundation for the HP Big Data Reference Architecture, an innovative new Hadoop infrastructure design that leverages the strength of HP’s portfolio to deliver a differentiated solution. The HP Big Data Reference Architecture deploys a standard Hadoop distribution in an asymmetric fashion, enabling customers to scale storage and compute independently, providing up to twice the performance in 50 percent less space. This results in substantial reduction in total cost of ownership, as well as improvements in performance and energy efficiency.

Scale-up Compute
Data-intensive, scale-up workloads such as in-memory and structured databases require high performance, availability and reliability as well as disaster tolerance. HP addresses these requirements with a scale-up Compute portfolio consisting of HP Integrity Superdome X as well as HP ProLiant DL580, 560 and BL660c Gen9 servers.

HP Integrity Superdome X is now certified for Windows and is ideal to support SQL Server 2014 deployments requiring the highest levels of transactional throughput and fast response times. With a large memory footprint and high-availability features, including hard partitioning that is 20 times more reliable than soft partitions, HP Integrity Superdome X is also an excellent fit for in-memory computing applications that require the greatest levels of flexibility for the most stringent service level agreements. Additionally, HP Integrity Superdome X delivers 40 percent lower total cost of ownership than Oracle Exadata X5-2.

The HP ProLiant DL580 Gen9 server delivers the highest performance and scalability in a four socket x86 system, with superior reliability and efficiency for resource and data-intensive workloads, such as in-memory platforms and structured databases like Microsoft SQL Server 2014. It has resiliency features and a compelling total cost of ownership based on the breakthrough cost efficiencies of the scale-up model with consolidation and virtualization. The HP ProLiant DL580 Gen9 server is integrated in the HP ConvergedSystem 500 to provide increased processing power, memory size and I/O capability to process and manage large volumes of information quickly.

The HP ProLiant DL560 Gen9 server is a high-density four-socket server for multi-workload compute, where data center space and price/performance are paramount. Its balanced performance, increased scalability and expansion, all in a 2U chassis, make it the ideal choice for virtualization, server consolidation, business processing and general 4P data-intensive applications.

The HP ProLiant BL660c Gen9 is a four-socket Compute server blade that transforms legacy converged infrastructures to increase the speed of business and support growth while reducing data center footprint. Scalable performance, flexible configurations, boosted compute operations and manageability through HP OneView enable it to serve demanding workload environments such as databases, virtualization, consolidation, modeling/simulation and public cloud to deliver results faster for agile businesses.