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HP Claims Their Moonshot System is a 'New Style of IT' (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the my-server-uses-less-power-than-yours dept.

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)

9 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. 4.3 U by digsbo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    4.3U? They couldn't have made a reasonable tradeoff to go to an even unit size?

    1. Re:4.3 U by mlts · · Score: 4, Funny

      A swimming pool noodle cut to fit works perfectly with gaps in the hot/cold aisles. Don't ask how I know...

    2. Re:4.3 U by radarskiy · · Score: 3, Informative

      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

  2. Re:But Moonshot is years old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Only HP would call them "server cartridges". I think their CEO cartridge is running low, they should go get a new one.

  3. Amazing. by ddt · · Score: 5, Funny

    "If you do algorithms, things of that nature, you can run on these systems."

    Sold!

  4. What does their website run on? by guytoronto · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Totally would buy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If I had the money, I'd totally buy it and avoid the cluster****ery that is cloud services.

    BUT...

    Notice what the average cpu is. Intel Atom class hardware. Or in otherwords, this is designed for doing dreamhost-style weak cloud VPS, so while you may have 45 servers in the box, the net performance is ... well...

    The Atom processor picked, S1260 (2 core, 4 thread @ $64.00 )has a passmark of 916
    The highest rated is Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 @ 2.70GHz, passmark 17361
    So 19 of those Atoms (38 cores, 76 threads) = 1 E5-2697v2 (12 core, 24 thread @ $2614.00)
    One dual E5-2697v2 server is almost equal, and you have 24 usable cores that could be turned into weak VPS servers. Get the point I'm making?
    Moonshot might be a better choice for provisioning weak dedicated hosts instead of VPS's (which are inherently weak, even when running on solid hardware, they are still subject to being oversold.) The S1260 is 64$, the E5-2697v2 is $2614, or roughly the cost of 40 of the Atom's. So on paper someone might go "oh look I can can afford an entire moonshot server for the price of a single cpu E5-2697v2 and get twice as many cores, when the single thread performance of the 2697 is a passmark of 1,662 (yes . 181% of the 4 threads of the Atom.)

    The thing is, this kind of configuration is better suited for certain tasks, such as a web server cluster front end (where it's rarely the CPU, but the network infrastructure that's the bottleneck) where you can turn on or off identical servers as required, and none of them actually need hard drives connected, they can just be PXE booted from a NAS.

    Though I'm worried when I see "software defined" anywhere in marketing, as most virtualization software fails hard when under load (75%CPU.) So maybe a data center that is space/power constrained can see a use for this, but if you're running a high usage website, you're better off optimizing the software stack (like switching to nginx or using Varnish in front of apache httpd +php-fpm instead of leaving it at the highly inefficient httpd prefork+mod_php) than deploying more inefficient servers.

    1. Re:Totally would buy by Maxwell · · Score: 3, Informative

      Shouldn't you be telling that to HP? from the site: "The HP ProLiant Moonshot Server is available with the Intel® Atom Processor S1260...."

  6. IBM? by s.petry · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.