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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."
Atom processors are notoriously slow. You can't play 3d video games on them.
65% less per core
" ...89% less energy, 80% less space, 77% less cost, and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Yet no mention of performance compared to that same "traditional" sever. I'm going to guess about 60-80% less.
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.
Sounds sweet!!
HP tried this with Transmeta a while back, and produced blades that completely sucked - WAY too slow. Individual machines on blades are dead, unless you need HPC type power, and Atom ain't that. If you need to squeeze 1800 limp servers into a rack, VMWare and its children are already there.
Sorry HP, you suck. Go back to making shitty printers, and then get out of the way. Hopefully your corpse will provide the fertilizer for some new market leader to grow from.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
"uses 97% less complexity"
*twitch*
Would somebody please find the marketers/editors that wrote this and shoot them? THXBYE
Whenever slashdot asks "Will it be enough?" what do we say everybody? NO! We say N-O. No.
HP has been attracting fail like it's a government project with unlimited funding and no congressional oversight. I mean seriously, we may be breaking into new physics here with the strong attractive force that all things HP have to all things Fail. And no technology is going to fix that, because the ultimate source of the bogon radiation is (wait for it) HP senior management. They'll figure out a way to screw this up, trust me. They could have just discovered the Holy Grail and they'd still somehow figure a way to botch it so instead of getting eternal youth, we're stuck with an endless series of ever more-expensive drinking glasses that can only hold certain types of beverages and occasionally explode for no reason.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The Money Shot?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
From the HP Site: "The HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis has 45 hot-pluggable servers installed and fits into 4.3U. The density comes in part from the low-energy, efficient processors. The innovative chassis design supports 45 servers, 2 network switches, and supporting components."
Each pluggable unit support 1x 2GHZ intel atom S1200 series cpus (2x core, 4x thread), up to 1 dimm @ 8gb, and one SFF sata drive. That gives you 90 cores/180 threads, 360GB's in 4.3u.
For comparison a 6RU cisco UCS chasis can put down up to 160 Cores / 320 threads, 4TB of memory. Those are high performance Xeon cores. Not sure on the $$$ per compute/memory between the two.
The really big question is are there enough use cases for that many "thin" servers. At 2 cores and 8GB of ram you are very thing by modern standards and there is 0 opportunity for vertical growth.
When did we start saying nitric oxide?
So...former HP customer, or former employee?
I'm guessing you haven't actually used HP servers or compared them to the competition. In my experience they completely kick Dell's butt, and give IBM a real run for their money, at much lower cost. I evaluated a ProLiant Gen8 and the manageability features were pretty impressive. The thing can update it's firmware and send SNMP traps, etc, from bare metal, without an OS.
Granted, HP had some crappy CEOs, and on the low-end consumer stuff they race to the bottom with everyone else, but their servers are serious and arguably industry-leading. They also sell more PCs than anyone anywhere, unless you start counting every iPod touch as a "computer."
Really - do you even know anything about the HP server line? Are you aware that HP servers (ProLiant - from Compaq) outsell the next 5 competitors - combined? What exactly are you expecting to be "revived"?
Someone at Phoronix really needs to learn basic math. The Chassis is 4.3U and hold 45 of these Moonshot servers, so a 47U rack could fit 10 chassis' for a total of 450 servers.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
Or one of the ousted CEOs or board members? Hum, I could almost believe Leo was a girl in training.
seems like a few years old Seamicro http://www.seamicro.com
Nope. http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/8/2008/04/Melies_TripMoon_largest.jpg
th4t FrreBSD is
I dunno.
The HP P4000s SANs are pretty nice when compared with comparable equipment.
Of course, they got them by buying LeftHand.
But yeah, long gone are the days of the solid Laserjet 4250 days with millions of prints that made them worth refurbishing.
THL phish sticks
"[...]and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Wait, what? How in the world did they measure this? I'm seriously curious as to this dubious number.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
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.
Come one, I call shenanigans on this one. Seriously, a site where the majority of the submissions seem to take at least a day or more to propagate to actually being posted has a post about a random new HP product where the only really informative link is to what basically amounts to a press release hosted on their own site?
I understand things are tough all over and you gotta make money to survive, but do they really think their readers are that stupid?
more robust (yes, this is different from reliable)
What is the difference between robust and reliable?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
subject says it
Considering the fact that only a small percentage of even IT people understand just how much server horsepower is required for many typical tasks that environments require of them, I don't expect a huge demand for these Moonshot servers. The specs however are very well suited for many applications used in small to medium sized businesses. And when you get to those who would see appropriate use for these, the price of the chassis is very ugly.
Yeah, HP servers weren't bad after they bought Compaq and pretty much abandoned the old line of HP servers.
Learn to love Alaska
"[...]and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Wait, what? How in the world did they measure this? I'm seriously curious as to this dubious number.
I had pretty much the same thought.
Drastically increasing the number of servers does not sound like a way to drastically decrease complexity. If this really does simplify things, I'd like to know how.
"[...]and 97% less complexity than traditional servers."
Wait, what? How in the world did they measure this? I'm seriously curious as to this dubious number.
"Now with 67.3% more dubious numbers than traditional advertising copy!"
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Yeah, HP servers weren't bad after they bought Compaq and pretty much abandoned the old line of HP servers.
Hey! That's enough of that give-credit-where-credit-is-due crap. This is HP's spotlight. After all, they paid for it.
"Hi, yeah, could I get a number 2 with a coke? Oh, and large fries. And can you reduce the complexity on that? By how much? I don't know, 100%? Oh, you can only do 97? Ok fine, I'll take that. Oh, and a chocolate shake."
robust = when it breaks, it can be fixed more easily
reliable = doesn't break as often
it's gonna break either way
I'm pretty sure a 3U quad-Opteron setup will outrun a 47U rack full of Atoms, and with a much smaller I/O headache.
Virtual desktop
They break in predictable ways. All equipment will have failures. Do you want to spend the time swapping power supplies and hard drives that tell you when they have failed, or figuring out what the fuck is the matter with this broken box?
A good example is something I've experienced multiple times. A hard drive in an array fails hard. In a Proliant, you get a red light and the machine keeps running. In a Dell or IBM, it takes down the whole disk bus and you have to take time pulling individual drives and reenabling the array until you figure out which drive is the bad one.
its called Xen, KVM, and VMware (to name 3) virtuoso, parallels, vbox, and vps to name 4 more and they all works very well and each "server" can be scaled to what it needs and others scaled down to what there minimum requirements are. The idea of having a single virtual machine on a virtualized micro kernel isn't necessarily a bad one, its good for isolation for secure servers. But these seem way too under powered and do they support server virtualization, my guess is NO they do not. More over with the invention of thread virtualization the need to split up the servers into separate servers is diminished by several factors, since it will probably be a long time before anything can escape from thread virtualization. Thread virtualization will become a huge hit in the next few years I am guessing, but this wont. What is a Virtual Machine?
True. In the case of web severs serving static files, the CPU sits around waiting for the hard drive to send a file to the network card. Partly because CPU speeds have increased by 40X while hard drive speeds have only doubled, for many workloads the CPU isn't the limiting factor and an Atom would work just fine.
A shoe uses 100% less power too. Does not mean it makes a useful server.
When I read the article I was harkened back to my days working with an IBM 390 mainframe. Massively parallel blah blah. It seems the pendulum does swing back periodically....
Not true.
Server loads are either CPU bound, Disk bound, or Network bound.
If you're doing CDN, the disk is meaningless and you're limited entirely by the weak-ass CPU in the server. You can put 300 of these in the same power envelope that you can put 4 dual-quad-core systems. (eg 32 CPU cores.) That's increase in cpu density of only about 10, but at a reduction in performance (E1200 is about a 700 passmark score(350 per core), while the dual Xeon E5 quadcore of the same speed has a score closer to 6000. So the passmark rating per core for the E5 is 750.) So once the power in watts being wasted vs initial investment is evaluated, nobody would ever buy the Atom parts for a server except where it's guaranteed that the systems will be mostly underutilized. An idle E5 may waste 135 watts, where as an idle Atom wastes 6.
If you're doing web-serving, most of these Atom parts are sufficient, and far superior to ALL VPS's being sold by the likes of dreamhost and amazon EC2.
But Atom parts are completely wrong parts for file servers, database servers, and
Am I the only one that noticed that this processor is not 2008 deriverived, rather a brand new 22nm based one?
all of these "hot and loud" comments are getting on my nerves, and Im an AMD fan.
not really, a mainframe of S390 era had very few cores. mainframe architecture isn't about a bunch of systems network connected all running separate OS instances. It's instead a "star architecture" of processors connected to "peripheral processing units" to offload IO work.
... only a decade later.
in a lot of cases the packages are zipped (apart from compiling, caching, etc.) before they are send, which costs CPU and RAM
They're talking about the number of network cables and power cables.
i don't know anything about server rooms, but this is cool considering how fickle consumers are: .. thank you HP : )
one day you have like zero (or one) visitor to your site and tomorrow maybe a thousand and then maybe again nothing.
i'd rather have something that can "spin down" if not needed but push when it's needed.
a xeon can only spin down so much.
and it looks "sexy": pull out and place in from top ha?
my hp mini (via cpu) is still working
side note: the hardware coming out is really awesome, but what OS (has drivers) is actually supposed to run it anyways? or
exists there someplace a TOP-SECRET operating system mere mortals don't know about that will get thrown
on to this new machines?
You need to support such accusations, but you can't.
There are members of a lot of civil rights groups that have worked with Ron Paul, have high praise for him. There are no examples of him making racist remarks, behaving in a racist way.
Ron Paul is a very honest man, far beyond his fellow politicians. Again, you can't support your claims.
I haven't seen an individual disk take down a Dell or even whitebox disk array (or the handful of IBM ones I've used since then) since they went to SAS back around 2005-6.
The Dell ones, and the better whitebox models, give you a flashing light showing which drive is bad. Anything with enclosure services will also show you which drive is bad in software, if you have a decent RAID card or a decent smart array (and cost and performance-wise, it's almost always better to get a JBOD and a smart card than to get the controller in the array.)
Who said anything about Hadoop? These guys pack enough punch to do some serious computing, who cares about disk.
We have dedicated platforms for handling our storage tiers, anyway. This is obviously not their purpose.
robust - can drop it and it still works.
reliable - stick it in a corner and ignore it. It will continue to work and work and work.
In my experience they completely kick Dell's butt, and give IBM a real run for their money, at much lower cost. I evaluated a ProLiant Gen8 and the manageability features were pretty impressive. The thing can update it's [sic] firmware and send SNMP traps, etc, from bare metal, without an OS.
Those have been fairly standard service processor features, actually, for a number of years. The SNMP trap thing is slightly annoying, in that everyone seems to assume that some application that can handle traps is available. The latest iLO 4 firmware introduces the ability to syslog (which is somewhat broken still - and something Sun did years ago) and send email (also done by Sun years ago). Unlike IBM and Dell and Cisco's UCS servers, HP Gen 8 systems with iLO 4 >1.05 have serial consoles that work right out of the box for bootstrapping (also done by Sun years ago). iLO also has the ability to mount an ISO image over the net via an HTTP URL, which is quite handy at times. The HP Gen 8 systems (with iLO 4) really are a distinct step above the G7 systems in a number of ways, eg. PXE booting doesn't inexplicably force the console to 115200 bps, lack of the bizarre MCE issues that some G7 systems had, much better iLO, etc. Mid 2012 they finally came out with 25SFF / 10SFF chassis so that a decent number of internal disks can be provisioned, with SAS expanders embedded in the backplane. And most notably, at one point I complained to HP about their Smart Array HBA's not being able to do 3-way mirroring. I dunno for sure if they took my RFE personally, but the Gen 8 series of HBA's actually has that ability, something valuable I had not seen on products from Adaptec and LSI.
Granted, HP had some crappy CEOs, and on the low-end consumer stuff they race to the bottom with everyone else, but their servers are serious and arguably industry-leading.
Given the current product line, sure -- but the G5 / G6 / G7 systems had their share of suckage, including iLO systems that were painfully underpowered and sluggish. I demo'd a G5 system at one point and was incredulous that the PCI riser was attached to the chassis lid, such that opening the lid entailed ripping cards out of their slots. I think G5 and earlier systems also didn't come with the serial console working out of the box, which was a non-starter. HP, Dell, and IBM systems still share a bit of anachronistic suckage: the serial console is a DB9, straight out of 1990. Sun's systems have used RJ45 connectors for *years*. HP refuses to even include or even spec an adapter for their DB9 consoles -- we had to try a bunch of different models to see what worked, then I bought 50 of the things.
The additional complexity of a traditional server is now transferred into software. They probably compared to something like a component count of a full-sized server cluster or a system with equal number of cores.