HP officially introduced ProLiant Gen8 servers in Russia

An event for HP customers took place in Moscow on March 14, at which the long-awaited ProLiant servers of the new generation, named Gen8, were officially presented.

The servers were developed as part of Project Voyager, the third of HP's innovative projects, designed to seriously transform the server market. We have already written about two other projects, Project Moonshot and Project Odyssey in a blog, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with these posts in order to better understand HP's strategy and motivation in an actively changing market.

In order to better illustrate the position occupied by HP in the world alignment of forces, we will cite a few figures from the report of Rhys Austen, head of Blade Systems and HP Virtualization in the EMEA region.

According to IDC, for the fourth quarter of 2011, HP is the largest server supplier in the world. In 2011, the new server was shipped approximately every 11 seconds, and the share of HP servers in total production, for ease of understanding, is approximately one out of every three.
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With regard to blade servers, HP's position is even stronger - the company sells more blade systems than IBM, DELL and Cisco combined. The share of HP blades in Russia is 57%, and that of regular servers exceeds 41%. The latter figure is particularly impressive, given the presence of local manufacturers and a large number of "self-assembled" servers on ready-made platforms.

But back to Gen8. By the way, the designation of a new generation differs in writing from all previous ones (G7, G6, etc.). The reason for this - the orientation of the giant Chinese market. The fact is that the Mandarin dialect of the Chinese phrase "GI-Eight" (G8) can mean a very, very obscene word. What exactly - the sources of HP are silent, blushing. But the fact remains that at least a couple of years we will have to live with the name Gen8.

As stated by HP, ProLiant Gen8 servers are the most self-sufficient servers in the world today. They constantly monitor their status in hundreds of parameters and have a lot of means to correct non-critical failures and errors without administrator participation. More than $ 300 million was invested in the development of the line in two years, about 900 applications for patents were filed, and the starting point was data accumulated in more than 100 thousand reviews of real users. The result was more than 150 innovations that radically improved many aspects of server interaction.

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In particular, the server lifecycle management system, Integrated Lifecycle Automation, allows you to increase the efficiency of the administrator three times. Dynamic load balancing Dynamic Workload Acceleration raises performance up to 600%. Well, the automatic optimization of the energy consumption level Automated Energy Optimization increases the volume of operations per watt consumed by 70%.

Other systems are even more impressive. The new iLO, the most valuable tool of any administrator working with HP servers, significantly increases productivity compared to previous lines. Intelligent Provisioning reduces the deployment time threefold, and the initial diagnostics is available already 3 seconds after the server is turned on. Active Health analyzes more than 1600 system parameters, independently finds and corrects errors, at the same time collecting data for analysis 5 times faster than before. HP Smart Update automates the installation of updates from a single service pack, thereby saving up to 69% of operator time.

In Gen8, HP is actively using the capabilities of mobile devices and remote management tools with a web interface. Now, for example, the iLO integrated remote control system can be “steered” from a smartphone on Android or iOS — special applications have been developed. That is, if necessary, the administrator will be able to "reach out" to the server from almost anywhere through the graphical interface. Through the Insight Online system, an administrator can see statistics on their servers in the HP Customer Support Portal, automatically detecting and correcting failures before an outage occurs.


Insight Online

In the new line for the first time implemented technology 3D Sea of ​​Sensors (three-dimensional sea of ​​sensors). If we describe it briefly (we will definitely have a more detailed post with all the characteristics), then this is a single sensor system inside servers that can connect with new server racks from HP to implement such important functions as server location in the rack and data center, and also drawing up thermal maps. Moreover, the more new servers and racks in the data center, the more accurate the map will be. In addition, it becomes much easier to visualize the data center, it is enough to extract data from the system.

The sea of ​​sensors also allows you to spend much more efficient energy: new power supplies automatically recognize the connection and allow you to set a rigid framework for the expenditure of electricity by each server. Electricity is distributed automatically, which eliminates the need for manual configuration, which often causes errors. Thus, the number of failures in the data center associated with incorrect configuration is reduced by a quarter.

Well, for sweets - two of the most notable innovations of a hardware nature: SmartSocket and SmartDrive. The first one is a completely redesigned processor socket by HP engineers, completely eliminating the possibility of a socket socket breakage on the motherboard. And the second is a highly modified hard drive sled, which has a clearer indication of the disk status, including the “Do not remove!” Checkbox that lights up when the disk is under critical load.

But all this - only the very tops of what we want to tell you. Stay on the line!
For now, does anyone who was at our events on March 14-16 in Moscow and St. Petersburg read us? How do you gingerbread, and in general? :)