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HP Launches Moonshot
New submitter linatux writes "HP has announced their 'Moonshot 1500 server' — up to 1,800 servers per 47U rack are supported. The tech certainly seems to be an advance on what is currently available — will it be enough to revive HP's server fleet?"
From Phoronix: "Moonshot began with Calxeda-based ARM SoCs, but in the end HP settled for Intel Atom processors. Released today were HP's Moonshot system based on the Intel Atom S1200. Hewlett-Packard claims that their Moonshot System uses 89% less energy, 80% less space, 77% less cost, and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Low power and massive amounts of parallel cores is alright, but does it compute? How do these low power servers benchmark against EC2 or equivalent? This article didn't talk benchmarks. Maybe you get all these gains in consumed power, cost, space etc... because it is 90% less powerful than competitors.
Build a man a fire and you warm him for a day. Set a man on fire and you warm him for the rest of his life.
And we all know that datacenter servers are used only for running the front-end of 3D games. Oh no, this product must be DOOMED!
I'll absolutely second this - HP's servers kick ass, quite frankly. They've had a few pretty major problems in recent years (P400 and P800 array controllers were absolute pieces of shit from a reliability standpoint, and the P410 STILL doesn't work quite right with SATA drives, though it rocks with SAS disks), but overall the engineering that goes into HP servers puts them well ahead of their competition, from what I've experienced. I've used Dell, IBM, white box, and HP, on the scale of "hundreds to thousands" of each brand, stretching back 10+ years.
The HP's have been more reliable, more configurable, more robust (yes, this is different from reliable), more manageable, and FAR better supported. There's a reason companies pay a premium for HP hardware, and it's because it pays for itself many over during the life of the hardware.
There are companies and applications that don't need that kind of reliability and run on shoddy white-box hardware... think Google, Facebook, etc. There are others, particularly stateful services like telephony and conferencing, that depend on reliable hardware. For those like that, servers like what HP provides will always be in demand. So long as HP maintains their focus on engineering in the server space, they won't be going anywhere soon.