Guest blog written by Bob Moore, Group Manager, Business Strategy, Industry Standard Server Division
As an HP employee with 10 plus years service, I’ve witnessed many significant changes in the information technology industry. For example, I was there when Compaq launched industry standard server solutions that would help modernize data centers and dramatically reduce cost and complexity for businesses. To achieve this, we leveraged the processor technology from desktop computers and migrated it into a server platform. It sounds silly now, but at the time there were many doubters who said it couldn’t be done - saying that large data centers couldn’t possibly be powered with servers based on simple industry standard processors, commonly available in desktop machines. The IT industry quickly learned that it was not only possible, but it would also provide customers with significant cost savings over the more traditional large mainframe type systems.
Interesting enough, a similar trend is happening today. With the huge rise in people who own mobile devices, there is not only a challenge for web serving data centers, but there is also a potential solution. Every second, some 200,000 texts are sent from mobile devices and a vast amount of information is accessed from those devices than from any other source. This kind of extreme usage clearly puts a huge demand on the datacenters that provide the information to billions of mobile users. Did you know that some datacenters of popular web sites companies consume as much electricity as major metropolitan cities? The cost, complexity, and power consumption is unrelenting and with our online appetites, it’s not stopping any time soon. With this in mind, it seems that the web services industry has come to an inflection point.
We could either:
- Continue to have incremental improvements in energy efficiency and cost savings, or
- Invent a new revolutionary change
Like many great innovators and explorers, HP has chosen to invent a new way to handle the extreme amount of information coming from mobile users, providing a game changing opportunity for our customers. We call it Project Moonshot and it is specifically designed to help companies that deliver web services, social media, and simple content, more efficient applications as well as energy and cost savings that were simply not possible in the past.
So once again, the IT industry will benefit enormously - this time from a new extreme low energy server infrastructure. Project Moonshot can deliver up to 89% less energy usage in approximately 1/10th the space, with potential overall cost savings of up to 63%*, representing a quantum leap forward in the savings for web hosting data center markets. Imagine taking 10 rack cabinets and replacing them with just 1. Imagine the environmental savings from datacenters that will consume almost a tenth of the electricity they normally use.
Like previous inventions, there are some who don’t think it’s possible. Of course, there were people who thought the world was flat, who though man would never fly, and who thought computers would never be small enough to be in someone’s personal home.
At HP we chose to do these things not because they are the easy, but because it is the right thing to do - for our customers, the industry and our communities.
For more information, check out HP’s Project Moonshot for extreme low-energy server technology or other hyperscale information, or follow us on Twitter at @HPHyperscale.
* Based on weighted average performance projections for workloads such as web serving, memcached, and Data Analytics. Cost estimates include infrastructure, space, and power and cooling costs over three years.
