Presenting the new HP ProLiant DL385p Gen8 server

[#1]

Hi Folks!

Barry Brooks with HP ISS worldwide mainstream product marketing, will take a moment to share with you how the new DL385p Gen8 rack server offers customers “Performance and flexibility that mean business”.

Your customers are dealing with a variety of escalating challenges, and they’re looking to us to help them come up with solutions. Delays and outages can cost them valuable time and money.

With the new DL385p Gen8 server, you can offer your clients a solution that can adapt to changing environments,  offer a variety of configuration choices, reduce their downtime, and help future-proof their infrastructure. If we can help your customers get over these hurdles, they can focus their resources on new business instead of IT maintenance.

So what will customers get with the new DL385p Gen8 servers?

First, they’ll get AMD’s powerful Opteron 6200 series processors which offer a choice of 4, 8, 12, and 16 cores with speeds up to 3.3GHz. They’ll also be able to get DDR3 memory at speeds up to 1600MHz, and a 768GB maximum memory footprint with the introduction of 32GB load reduced DIMMs.

For storage, we’ve increased capacity substantially with a variety of new drive cage options ranging from the standard 8+8SFF that customers have seen in the past to new 8LFF, 12LFF, and 25SFF cages. On top of this, clients will see added benefits from the next generation of embedded Smart Array P420i controllers and HP’s new SmartDrive technologies.

Our engineering teams have also tried to improve overall serviceability of the DL385p with a redesigned baffle, fan cage, cabling solution, and riser assembly.

Your clients will see additional savings with our new FlexibleLOM solutions. These new NIC options arriving with Gen8 give customers a level of flexibility they didn’t have before saving them from being locked into a less than preferred NIC solution while allowing them to upgrade in the future without having to burn extra slots in their servers.

Last, but not least, we have our new HP iLO Management Engine: a complete set of embedded management features supporting HP Power and Cooling, Agentless Management, Active Health System and Intelligent Provisioning.

The DL385p Gen8 will offer your customers several drive cage options at launch. The standard 8+8 SFF upgradable drive cage has been redesigned as the performance storage configuration option in Gen8. The second 8SFF drive cage requires the addition of a secondary controller to the server. In this configuration, the customer gets up to 400,000 IOPs of storage processing power across 16SFF hard drives.

By moving the video connector, power button, USB input, and UID light to the ears on the front of the server, we freed up more real estate for hard disk drives. This change, along with our new SmartDrive hard disk carriers, enabled us to offer new 8LFF, 12LFF, and 25SFF drive cage options. These options must be selected at time of purchase and are not field upgradable.

The 12LFF and 25SFF drive cage options come with expanders built-in to the drive cages enabling them to run off of the single embedded P420i controller. While these solutions only offer 200,000 IOPs of storage processing power, they allow for future storage growth into even larger footprints than were offered in G7.

Speaking of SmartDrive carriers, our new hard drive carriers are slimmer than the previous G7 carriers. It is critical that you remind customers that Gen8 carriers only work in Gen8 servers and that prior gen drives will not fit in Gen8 servers.

HP’s Gen8 Smart Array controllers have several significant enhancements over the prior generation. The new P420i embedded controller supports up to 2GB of flash backed write cache to allow faster access to data and improved rebuild times. The new controller also supports twice the number of drives allowing the customer to attach up to 227 combined internal and external drives. ACU management tools are now embedded and easier to access. Migrating data from one generation to the next should be seamless and should let customers get up and running more quickly. Also new to this generation, SSD wear gauge technology allows customers to track the number of writes and erases on their SSD drives helping them predict upcoming drive failures.  

In an effort to improve serviceability of the Gen8 servers, the design team moved to flat cables and side cable retention guards. Access to the memory DIMMs and removal and installation of the now clear air baffle has been considerably improved. This new design has the added benefit of helping to reduce thermal blockages through the heart of the server allowing us to improve power usage by removing some of the workload on the fans.

The new fan assembly design allows removal of the entire bank of hot plug fans, while still retaining the ability to remove and replace individual fans. This new feature makes accessing the hard drive backplanes much easier.

Each riser assembly can now be accessed simply and independently using a new tool-less design. Just turning the two blue tabs on each riser assembly 180 degrees releases and locks down the assembly.

The DL385p Gen8’s risers are all PCIe gen 2. The primary riser is a three slot x16, x8, x4, and the optional secondary riser is a three slot x16, x8, x8. Please be aware that the Gen8 design requires the population of the second processor to be able to activate the secondary riser.

With DL385p Gen8 servers, our customers can choose the type of network adapter they want to use for their specific environments.  Instead of embedding the adapter on the server system board as we’ve done in the past, we’ve separated the primary server NIC from the system board using our FlexibleLOM technology.

Customers now have a choice between a variety of FlexibleLOM options from 1Gb to 10Gb Ethernet to Infiniband to Converged Network Adapters that support FcOE. They can also choose from a variety of suppliers like Broadcom, Intel, Mellanox, Qlogic and Emulex.

FlexibleLOMs are also field upgradeable, so if a customer chooses 1Gb Ethernet for today’s workloads, and a year later has to upgrade their network infrastructure to support 10Gb, they can replace their FlexibleLOMs without using up a slot in their servers.

In addition to the remote console, remote power, and virtual media features of prior generations, there are four key new functional areas added to the new iLO Management Engine.

First, Intelligent Provisioning takes the strengths of products like SmartStart, PSP, and HP SUM, enhances them with the latest ease of use features and places them where you can use them immediately, on the system board, thus eliminating the need to keep track of all those DVDs.

Next, a long-time desire of many of our customers is now available with Gen8, agentless management. Base hardware health monitoring and alerting functions now run directly on the iLO hardware, independent of the operating system and the processor.

Some server failures can be extremely hard to reproduce. They may escape regular diagnostic runs and can take a long time to fix. With Gen8’s new Active Health System, we offer an always-on diagnostics system recording constant feeds of telemetry data, configuration changes, and every alert in order to facilitate faster root-cause analysis and problem resolution.

Finally, with iLO Management Engine we also offer faster access to HP Insight Remote Support, HP’s 24x7 “phone home” remote support software.

That concludes this presentation on the HP ProLiant DL385p Gen8.

Thank you for taking the time to learn about all the new features offered in this exciting product. I hope you and your customers can benefit from the improvements our engineering teams have brought to the world’s #1 selling AMD rack server.

We hope this blog has been useful. We invite you to join our Facebook, YouTube, Twitter andLinkedIn!

Visit the HP ProLiant DL 385p Gen8 Server Overview website for additional details