Slashdot Mirror
HP Claims Their Moonshot System is a 'New Style of IT' (Video)
Didn't we already have something kind of like this called a Blade server? But this is better! An HP Web page devoted to Moonshot says, 'Compared to traditional servers, up to: 89% less energy; 80% less space; 77% less cost; and 97% less complex.' If this is all true, the world of servers is now undergoing a radical change. || A quote from another Moonshot page: "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.' These are software-defined servers. HP claims they are the first ones ever, a claim that may depend on how you define "software-defined." And what software defines them? In this case, at Texas Linux Fest, it seems to be Ubuntu Linux. (Alternate Video Link)
Being in IT sales, I am often required to surf HP's website. Their site is consistently painfully slow. You would think that a company like HP would make sure their servers could serve up webpages faster than a snail.
The whole promotion seems to resemble everything from IBM PureServers that were introduced about 2 years ago, but of course lacking any type of performance. At least the IBM servers allowed scaling, higher performance CPUs, integrated disks, etc..
When management and marketing design computers, this is what we get. HP has not really been a technical player for a long time, at least in terms of innovation. Superdome was okay, but Sun E class machines made them look like an old mainframe in terms of usability. Itanium flopped and they never put much into the PA RISC chips after that. Omniback and NNM were great, but required manpower and HP has despised T&M billing for as long as I've worked with them which goes back to HP-UX 9 and VUE days. (I contracted for them in Michigan, because they would not hire direct technical people).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Shouldn't you be telling that to HP? from the site: "The HP ProLiant Moonshot Server is available with the Intel® Atom Processor S1260...."
This is actually an established size from HP. It allows two 3.5" drives per vertical blade (cheaper than 2.5") which would not fit inside of a 4U chassis, but fits one more chassis per rack than 5U would