HP Compute Platforms and Solutions for Data-Intensive Workloads

HP announced new purpose-built compute platforms and solutions designed to help customers leverage all data assets in order to drive business outcomes, such as faster decision making, improved operational efficiency and direct content monetization.

Proliant DL580

Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 4.9 billion connected ‘things’ will be in use in 2015, up 30% from 2014 and will reach 25 billion by 2020.⁽¹⁾  This will cause an exponential increase in the amount of data, each of which will have a distinct value to the business. As a result, the industry is seeing the emergence of new technologies and architectures – from open source data analytics and database platforms to in-memory databases – built to derive value from data and deliver business outcomes.

HP’s compute platforms have been tailored to meet the specific requirements of these data-intensive workloads. These platforms are purpose-built for a range of emerging technologies and applications including mass content storage, block and file storage, unstructured and real-time analytics, as well as simple and transactional databases.

Integrity Superdome X server

The new and enhanced servers and solutions include: Apollo 2000; the Apollo 4000 systems family; the Big Data Reference Architecture; Integrity Superdome X; and the ProLiant DL580, DL560 and BL660c Gen9 servers. These servers are designed to optimize capacity and performance scalability, flexibility and cost efficiency with unique designs that address data center space, power and cooling challenges.

“The ever-increasing volume, velocity and variety of data have stretched traditional server technologies beyond their limits — it needs a set of purpose-built compute platforms specifically designed to extract the maximum value of the data,” said Alain Andreoli, SVP and GM, servers business unit, HP. “HP is innovating the designs of its broad Compute portfolio to align it to specific workload needs in order to help customers deliver the most impactful business outcomes by using data in ways that was impossible in the past.“

HP offers a spectrum of compute platforms and solutions so customers from small businesses to global enterprises can leverage their data to extract value. With this broad portfolio, customers can select the optimal server to address their application requirements, commensurate with growth objectives and without over-provisioning.

The solutions are augmented with HP services, as well as an extensive ecosystem of partner solutions and services.

Scale-out compute
Scale-out workloads such as object and virtualized storage and Apache Hadoop require compute platforms with performance scalability, density optimization, storage simplicity and configuration flexibility. HP addresses these requirements with a scale-out compute portfolio that consists of the Apollo 2000 and 4000 systems as well as Moonshot.

Apollo 2000 r2800 24SFF Chassis

The Apollo 2000 is the enterprise bridge to scale-out infrastructure. It is designed to deliver hyperscale efficiency and performance in traditional datacenters running general purpose and high performance workloads. The  space-saving system comes in a familiar form factor that has the same rack dimensions, cabling, management and serviceability attributes of traditional 1U rack servers, so it can be introduced in a non-disruptive way. Additionally, up to four independent hot-pluggable servers in a standard 2U chassis enable customers to mix and match servers for workload optimization.

Apollo 4000

The Apollo 4000 systems family includes three servers purpose-built for data-intensive workloads like Hadoop and big data analytics, in addition to object storage. This family offers a choice of capacity density, performance scalability with one and three nodes, and the flexibility to change the ratio of compute to storage to match workload requirements. It includes the industry’s densest 2U server in the Apollo 4200 with 28 large form factor (LFF) drives or 50 small form factor (SFF) drives.⁽²⁾  Additionally, the Apollo 4510 offers a 4U chassis with one server node providing rack-scale storage server density with up to 5.44PB in 42U rack. The Apollo 4530 offers three servers nodes in a chassis, making it ideal for Hadoop-based analytics, which leverages three-copy data replication.

These solutions are supported by the HP Haven big data platform featuring Vertica as well as HyperScale big data Ecosystem partners, including Cleversafe, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Microsoft and Scality. The solutions also support key open source projects like Ceph, OpenStack Swift and Apache Hadoop.

Apollo 4530

The Apollo 4000 servers, when combined with Moonshot, create the foundation for the big data Reference Architecture, an innovative Hadoop infrastructure design that leverages the strength of HP’s portfolio to deliver a differentiated solution. The big data Reference Architecture deploys a standard Hadoop distribution in an asymmetric fashion, enabling customers to scale storage and compute independently, providing up to twice the performance in 50% less space.⁽³⁾  This results in substantial reduction in TCO, as well as improvements in performance and energy efficiency.

Scale-up compute
Data-intensive, scale-up workloads such as in-memory and structured databases require high performance, availability and reliability as well as disaster tolerance. HP addresses these requirements with a scale-up Compute portfolio consisting of Integrity Superdome X as well as ProLiant DL580, 560 and BL660c Gen9 servers.

Integrity Superdome X is certified for Windows and is to support SQL Server 2014 deployments requiring the highest levels of transactional throughput and fast response times. With a large memory footprint and HA features, including hard partitioning that is 20 times more reliable than soft partitions, ⁽⁴⁾  Integrity Superdome X is an fit for in-memory computing applications that require the levels of flexibility for the most stringent SLAs. Additionally, HP Integrity Superdome X delivers 40% lower TCO than Oracle Exadata X5-2. ⁽⁵⁾

ProLiant DL580 Gen9

The ProLiant DL580 Gen9 server delivers performance and scalability in a four socket x86 system, with superior reliability and efficiency for resource and data-intensive workloads, such as in-memory platforms and structured databases like SQL Server 2014. It has resiliency features and a compelling TCO based on the breakthrough cost efficiencies of the scale-up model with consolidation and virtualization. The ProLiant DL580 Gen9 server is integrated in the Converged system 500 to provide increased processing power, memory size and I/O capability to process and manage large volumes of information quickly.

ProLiant DL560 Gen9

The ProLiant DL560 Gen9 server is a high-density four-socket server for multi-workload compute, where data center space and price/performance are paramount. Its balanced performance, increased scalability and expansion, all in a 2U chassis, make it the choice for virtualization, server consolidation, business processing and general 4P data-intensive applications.

ProLiant BL660c Gen9

The ProLiant BL660c Gen9 is a four-socket Compute server blade that transforms legacy converged infrastructures to increase the speed of business and support growth while reducing data center footprint. Scalable performance, flexible configurations, boosted compute operations and manageability through OneView enable it to serve demanding workload environments such as databases, virtualization, consolidation, modeling/simulation and public cloud to deliver results faster for agile businesses.

Services and support
HP offers a comprehensive set of support and consulting services to complement the new purpose-built Compute platforms. HP’s global team of Services experts are available to help design, deploy, manage and support their environment and processes, including consulting, migration, integration, outsourcing and support.

HP Financial Services (HPFS) creates the investment capacity to accelerate business transformation. Flexible investment solutions including HP Technology Refresh for Computing provide authorized partners and customers with the speed to access HP’s Compute solutions quickly and agility to adapt to change as it happens with the ability to refresh technology over time. ⁽⁶⁾

The Apollo 2000, big data Reference Architecture, Integrity Superdome X and ProLiant DL580 Gen9 are available through HP and worldwide channel partners. The Apollo 4000 family, ProLiant DL560 Gen9 and ProLiant BL660c Gen9 are expected to be available in early June 2015.

HP creates possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. With the broadest technology portfolio spanning printing, personal systems, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP delivers solutions for customers’ most complex challenges in every region of the world.

⁽¹⁾ Gartner, Inc. news release: Gartner Says 4.9 Billion Connected ‘Things’ Will Be in Use in 2015, November 2014.
⁽²⁾ Leadership capacity in a 2U rack server – up to 224TBs of direct attach storage per server. The highest storage density in any 2U server of any of the vendors’ public products showing on internet search.
⁽³⁾ Depending on workload as not all big data workloads are the same. Traditional MapReduce workloads had 16% better price/performance, with double the density and half the Watts. HBase had twice the performance for an equivalently-priced system. HP internal testing, April 2015.
⁽⁴⁾ HP Labs. Based on HA and field data modeling, August 2013. Peter Piet and Bruce Edson, using Markov chain HA modeling, running applications on separate nPars vs. running them together on the same nPar using VMs. HP, CA. August 2013. HA modeling and field data supports these claims. Doug Davies, HA modeling of Superdome X vs. SD2 and DL980. Date – 8/30/2013. HA modeling and field data supports these claims.
⁽⁵⁾ Compares an 8-socket Superdome X server and 3PAR StoreServ 7440c running RHEL and Serviceguard for Linux versus an Oracle Exadata X5-2 Half Rack running Exadata software and Oracle RAC. When comparing a 16-socket Superdome X server and  3Par StoreServ 7440c running RHEL and Serviceguard for Linux versus an Oracle Exadata X5-2 Full Rack running Exadata software and Oracle RAC, the TCO savings for Superdome X are 39%. Source: Based on HP internal analysis results using publicly available competitive data, April 2015.
(6) Financing and service offerings available through Hewlett-Packard Financial Services company and its subsidiaries and affiliates (collectively HPFSC) in certain countries and are subject to credit approval and execution of standard HPFSC documentation. Rates and terms are based on customer’s credit rating, offering types, services and/or equipment type and options. Not all customers may qualify. Not all services or offers are available in all countries. Other restrictions may apply. HPFSC reserves the right to change or cancel this program at any time without notice.