HP Delivers Purpose-Built Server for Big Data

Hewlett-Packard Development company, L.P. unveiled a server built to help clients operationalize big data, drive new business opportunities and save up to $1 million over three years (Based on internal calculations comparing Dell PowerEdge R510 servers plus four units of Dell Power Vault MD1200 direct attach storage, which consumes seven racks, 28 servers, 112 JBOD enclosures, 14 networking switches, 448 cables and 79 kilowatts of power to HP ProLiant SL4500 servers consuming three racks, six networking switches, 168 cables and 31 kilowatts of power.)

With the advent of big data software and the promise that it brings, many organizations have tried to deploy these solutions on existing architectures not designed to handle the specific needs of these workloads. As a result, the outcomes from these early deployments have been suboptimal from a performance and cost perspective.

"Big data application environments such as Hadoop, MPP data warehouses, big data analytics and object stores have very different workload requirements," said Dan Vesset, VP, Business Analytics Research, IDC. "Given the large and varied amounts of fast-moving data that needs to be stored and accessed quickly and the different requirements of end users, these workloads can be highly varied, complex and inefficient to manage if run on traditional hardware infrastructure. In order to fully embrace the promise of big data, it is critical that the underlying infrastructure be optimized for the workload."

The new ProLiant SL4500 server series is a solution built for big data environments. It provides performance, productivity and cost-effectiveness in a dense solution required by these workloads.

   
  
HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Server

Built on HP Converged Infrastructure, the new server offers an efficient design that consumes up to 50% less space, 61% less power and 31% lower cost while using 63% fewer cables. Modular architecture optimizes results for workload specific applications The modular design of the ProLiant SL4500 server series offers varied compute and storage configurations that enable clients to optimize their infrastructure for a workload-specific application, removing the need to piece together incongruent hardware for the supporting infrastructure.

With a single, cost-effective architecture, the ProLiant SL4500 server series also supports multiple Apache Hadoop vendors including Cloudera, Inc. and Hortonworks, Inc. as well as additional software including OpenStack Cloud Software and MongoDB.

"Enterprises that leverage Cloudera’s platform for big data to unlock insights across all of their data benefit from deploying infrastructure components optimized for the extreme demands of big data workloads," said Amr Awadallah, CTO, Cloudera. "By designing a server purpose built for big data, HP is offering the market a seamless new approach to processing large data sets efficiently and cost-effectively."

HP delivers performance and density
The ProLiant SL4500 Gen8 server series, with HP Smart Array technology, delivers performance with a nearly seven times faster IOPS than existing architectures (Based on internal testing that compares an HP ProLiant G7 server with a standard 15K SAS drive to that of HP ProLiant Gen8 server with a solid state drive.) With the smart analytics of HP SmartCache, the system will optimize storage traffic to ensure the lowest latency response and up-front investment.

Current server offerings cannot address the growing amounts of storage and servers for big data, forcing IT leaders to acquire additional expensive data center space. However, the new ProLiant SL4500 server series solves this problem by delivering storage density of up to 240TB in a single 4.3-rack-unit (U) chassis, or 2.16PB with nine servers in a 42U rack (Based on internal testing that compares an ProLiant G7 server with a standard 15K SAS drive to that of ProLiant Gen8 server with an SSD.) As a result of this density, clients realize significant cost savings, performance and efficiency.

Safeguard big data, simplify management
and support with ProLiant Gen8
The latest member of the ProLiant Gen8 family, the SL4500 server series is built with HP ProActive Insight Architecture, which embeds intelligence and automation capabilities allowing clients to:

• Eliminate down time and safeguard data with automated data protection and HP Predictive Spare Activation, which moves data to an alternate device before failures occur.
• Ensure maximum server productivity with HP Active Health, and automate firmware updates with Smart Update.
• Leverage services, support and warranty offering with HP Insight Online.
• Lower data center power costs and improve compute per watt by up to 70% than previous generations with HP Intelligent Infrastructure(HP internal comparison: HP ProLiant G7 to HP ProLiant G8.)

Enhances scale-out server portfolio
HP also announced updates to its HPC portfolio, enabling clients to maximize the performance benefits of the latest processing technology from Intel Corp. and NVIDIA Corp.

The ProLiant SL270s Gen8 server offers maximized processor density, with the ability to support up to eight Xeon Phi co-processors or eight NVIDIA Kepler graphic processing units (GPUs) per server. The ProLiant SL270s and SL250s Gen8 servers now support the latest NVIDIA Kepler GPUs and newly announced Xeon Phi co-processors, enabling clients to select the best accelerator or c-oprocessor for their workloads.

Pricing and availability
(Estimated U.S. street prices. Actual prices may vary.)

• The ProLiant SL4500 server series in a single node configuration is available worldwide for a starting price of $7,643.
• The ProLiant SL270s Gen8 servers will be available next month, with for a starting price of $6,166.
• The ProLiant SL250s Gen8 servers will be available with NVIDIA Kepler and Intel Xeon Phi processors early next year for a starting price of $5,659.