Guest blog written by Stan Grant, HP ISS Americas
With all the hoopla around the “X% better performance on this” and “Y% better price than that”, it’s often easy to get lost in the dizzying array of launch claims. But with the recent launch of the HP ProLiant and AMD Server Solutions microsite, which introduces the latest HP ProLiant G7 servers with AMD OpteronTM 6200 series processors, you’ll see that this launch was different. (Andrew Hawthorn’s blog titled, “Raising the bar (AGAIN) on server scalability & performance” provides a great overview of the announcement).
Make no mistake, like many launches, we share some awesome metrics -- like the worlds fastest dual socket database engine with up to a 40% improvement in throughput over the previous generations – but the real benefit we wanted to provide was helping customers solve problems and improve their businesses.
Here’s an example: As part of an US-based outbound sales effort, we reached out to hundreds of customers to get their feedback about ProLiant - and they like what they’ve heard. They grasp our joint message on how key workloads (virtualization, database, and high performance computing) work well with AMD Opteron and HP ProLiant, and they understand that having innovators looking out for their IT needs is a good thing. The result - they are placing orders, which is always a good thing!
But not only is it about what we’ve just announced, it’s also about what is coming. With the recent announcement of HP Project Moonshot (which focuses on extreme low-power server environments) customers will find that there is a real shift coming in how IT gets done. (Gary Thome’s blog titled, “Growing Faster than Moore’s Law: HP’s Project Moonshot” provides an overview of the project). Part of Project Moonshot is the HP Pathfinder Program, which AMD is a member of. Together we will collaborate on hyper-efficient future development to develop, deliver, standardize and deploy extreme low-energy server solutions.
At a recent HP sales conference, I was impressed to hear a forward-looking quote from the new CEO of AMD, Rory Read. He said, “Together, HP and AMD can introduce a set of value propositions that make a difference to the customer”.
So, what’s so impressive about that? We all know that both HP and AMD are known for their innovation. But neither is innovative just for innovation’s sake. We want to do more together to help businesses reduce power, cooling, space, and complexity and at the same time, increase performance, efficiency, scalability. Another quote from the Rory Read got me thinking. “The game in front of us is how computing is going to shift and it’s going to change”. Our job: Prepare the way, so the customer has a clear choice.
