HP announces first servers in the Gen8 family for improving management, ROI, and energy conservation in the data center

HP today announced general availability of the first batch of servers in its ProLiant Gen8 series, which the company unveiled last month.

The new generation of servers, part of a two-year, $300-million effort, benefit from ProActive Insight archtecture, including lifecycle automation, dynamic workload acceleration, automated energy optimization, and proactive service and support. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Manual operations and facilities management can cost companies more than $24 million over three years, while unplanned downtime is estimated to cost companies as much as $10 million an hour. As a result, data center managers must rely on more intelligent, self-sufficient technologies that eliminate the time-consuming, error-prone processes that consume valuable resources and can cause both failure and data loss.

ProLiant now includes the Intel Xeon E5-2600 processor family, which beta testing has indicated can provide a return on investment (ROI) in as little as five months, while tripling administrators' productivity.

HP developed the new generation of servers in collaboration with HP Labs, the company’s central research arm, to offer data center-wide, end-to-end energy management including HP 3D Sea of Sensors and HP Location Discovery Services. As a result, the new energy optimized technology included in the servers delivers nearly double data center capacity per watt.

To accelerate virtualized and data-intensive application performance, engineers balanced the system architecture while unifying storage, I/O and compute resources to create a converged system platform, designed for the needs of virtualized environments, cloud deployments and the most demanding data center and workloads available.

Lots of excitement

"We've seen lots of excitement among customers during the beta testing and not only in performance," said John Gromala, Director, Product Marketing, Industry Standard Servers and Software for HP. "We focused on their IT needs and we're helping them deal with runaway costs. That's the piece that people are more excited about than anything. If they can get those costs in line, then IT can make it."

The comprehensive portfolio of HP ProLiant Gen8 servers include:

• ProLiant BL460c, the world’s leading server blade, is ideal for a data center’s transition to the cloud

  That's the piece that people are more excited about than anything. If they can get those costs in line, then IT can make it.

  
  
• ProLiant DL360p, versatile, rack-optimized server that offers high performance, efficiency and reliability in a 1U space
  
• ProLiant DL380p, supports the broadest spectrum of workloads and provides for future scalability as needs change
  
• ProLiant ML350p, expandable tower server well suited for remote and branch offices
  
• ProLiant SL230s, a multi-node server for maximum performance of high density scale-out and high performance computing (HPC) environments
  
• ProLiant SL250s, ideal for heterogeneous and custom data centers focused on graphics processing unit (GPU) computing
  
• ProLiant DL160, ultra-dense rack server designed for web serving and memory-intensive applications.

Tested in more than 100 data centers by real-world customers, the new platforms are expected to ship worldwide in late March. Starting prices will range from $1,723 to $2,878 and vary based on configurations.

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