Bangalore: HP today announced one of its most awaited line of servers, the HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8).These Gen8 servers is the outcome of a two year long program called Project Voyager into which the company invested $300 million.
With this project the company attempted to redefine data center economics by automating every aspect of the server life cycle. To date, Project Voyager has resulted in more than 900 patents filed, 100 k and more customer interactions.
Biren Ghose, Country Head at Technicolor India, customer of HP servers who was present at the event discussed about how technology is being used in every domain, especially in the media world. On this note he said that “technology is no longer the domain of technology community,” he also highlighted how technology impacts other fields like arts “Science powers Arts” says Ghose.
These servers address the top concerns of enterprises. For example, in a typical 10,000 square foot data center:
Companies spend on average of $24 million over three years on manual operations to support servers. Gen8 servers triple administrator productivity by eliminating most manual operations such as server updates, which typically take five hours of administrator time per rack of servers. The industry-first HP Smart Update feature can perform the same update in 10 minutes or less.
Growing server energy and facilities expenses cost companies up to $29 million over three years. HP ProLiant Gen8 features HP 3-D Sea of Sensors, an industry-first technology that identifies overutilized servers based on real-time location, power, workload and temperature data, increasing compute capacity per watt of energy by 70 percent
Unplanned downtime costs clients approximately $10 million an hour. Gen8 is the only server that automatically analyzes its own health across 1,600 data points. Through self monitoring, self diagnosing and proactive support, clients can resolve unplanned downtime issues up to 66 percent faster.
“The skyrocketing cost of operations in the data center is unsustainable, and enterprises are looking to HP to help solve this problem,” said Vikram K, Director, Industry Standard Servers, HP India. “We are delivering innovative intelligence technologies that enable servers to virtually take care of themselves, allowing data center staff to devote more time to business innovation.”
Project Voyager is the third phase of HP’s multiyear transformation plan for the server market, which began in November 2011 with Project Moonshot. Project Moonshot changed how servers are built for extreme-low-energy computing. Project Odyssey, phase two, redefined the future of mission-critical computing. With phase three, Project Voyager, HP automates every aspect of the server life cycle.
Pricing and availability
Gen8 platforms introduced today are expected to ship worldwide in late March 2012. Starting prices will range from US$1,723 to $2,878 and vary based on configurations. This includes ML tower servers for remote and branch offices and versatile HP ProLiant DL rack-mount servers that deliver a balance of efficiency and performance. Also included are blade servers for cloud-ready Converged Infrastructure and HP ProLiant SL scalable system servers built for web, cloud and massively scaled environments.
