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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!
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.
Would somebody please find the marketers/editors that wrote this and shoot them? THXBYE
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#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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."
Nazi is a proper noun and thus must be capitalized.
And yet you don't know how to spell "capitalised". Bloody colonials...
But in all seriousness, this is a great idea for crowd sourcing.
Acquire startup funding and open a website for sponsors and volunteers. You could run it on TOR and pay the volunteers via bitcoin.
Donations are weighted depending on the amount donated, people could vote for the target they most wanted addressed first. The balances could just continue to grow until a volunteer accepts the job. Of course it would have to be a COD service and some sort of clear proof would be required, but it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
You could probably even get corporate sponsorship.
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.
Well the Cortex A15 has both.