Today’s data center challenges revolve round driving better efficiency and value for businesses as IT has moved from a simple deployment of services into a partner with the business, responsible for helping drive more agility, shortening decision times and optimizing shareholder value.

Since 2004, HP and AMD have been partnering to deliver industry leading server solutions to the marketplace.  Whether you’re a small business struggling with rapid growth or an enterprise data center trying to reign in out-of-control costs, the HP and AMD teams have developed industry leading products to meet your critical business needs.

Microsites have increasingly become a helpful way to consolidate key information.  Grouping web content together helps visitors easily locate information relevant to their queries.  Effective microsites are purposely designed to quickly engage with a specific audience.  The HP ProLiant Team has partnered with AMD to develop a new microsite focusing on HP ProLiant servers with AMD technology.  

By Jim Ganthier, VP, marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP

This past Monday, I spent the afternoon at the impressive de Young Museum in San Francisco for AMD’s Opteron 6100 series launch event.

The event kicked off with AMD CMO, Nigel Dessau, taking us through a brief history of Opteron, with its rich and compelling message, before introducing attendees to AMD’s latest processor technology.

Nigel was then joined onstage by Christine Reischl, SVP & GM of HP’s Industry Standard Servers group, and Matt Lavallee, Director of Technology for MLS PIN, the northeast’s foremost provider of real estate listings to more than 30,000 subscribers. Matt spoke about his key IT challenges (cost, performance and energy) as well as the dramatic efficiencies in these key areas that he has enjoyed thanks to HP ProLiant technology. Matt has been an HP customer since our first generation of servers and is operating an entirely HP shop!

Christine Reischl went on to talk a bit more about the latest generation of ProLiant servers delivering customers like Matt a return on his server investment in just 2 months (less than a budget cycle) when compared to servers just a few generations old.  Christine also spoke about the 27x performance per watt boost these systems deliver, as well as the up to 96% reduction in power and cooling costs customers can reap with HP’s innovative Thermal Logic technologies built right in to our servers.

Here's a picture of Nigel, Christine and Matt on stage:

After HP, Nigel welcomed to the main stage a couple of other OEMs with their customers before thanking the OEM and software partners, customers and attendees for being there.

The event then broke to a very informal reception where press, industry analyst, customer and partner attendees could see the latest AMD Opteron-based platforms available. HP showed off our new ProLiant DL165 and DL385 rack-optimized servers, as well as our SL165z, “skinless” scale-out server.

At one point in the day, I found myself huddled in a near deserted shop next to several Nefertiti statues speaking to some business press reporters via phone on the news of the day. Later Monday evening, Christine and I enjoyed dinner with Nigel and Dave Fionda from AMD where we reflected on the day’s events, chatted about our long-standing partnership and the exciting road ahead.

Overall, our time in San Francisco was beneficial to both HP and AMD and we look forward to a continued partnership.

Here’s a photo of some of the HP team onsite:

By Jim Ganthier, VP, marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP

Today is a big day for HP and AMD. We have been partners with AMD for quite a while (in my case going back to the industry's first AMD based Presario's in the mid-90's), We jointly introduced HP’s first AMD Opteron based server in 2004, and together we have delivered a great combination of server performance and innovation for our customers. I'm very happy to see that as AMD launches its new AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors, our strong partnership continues with the next generation of HP ProLiant servers.

Our customers are finding that HP's ProLiant server innovations address their key needs and pain points - energy efficiency, virtualization and management - and deliver more business value on every IT dollar they spend. The result: strong returns over and above their server refresh investments. The value proposition of our latest generation ProLiant servers is clear and customers are clearly voting with their wallets. ProLiant G6 servers have experienced the fastest generational transition in HP's 20-year x86 server history.

In fact, when replacing three generation old servers (ProLiant G4) with today's new ProLiant systems, customers can see a 27x improvement in performance in the same power envelope, consolidation ratios of as much as 23:1 and a pay-back on their investment in as little as 2 months.

These great customer benefits and ROI are enabled by the innovative capabilities in our next generation ProLiant servers, such as lower energy bills through our innovative HP Thermal Logic technologies. This includes Sea of Sensors - 32 sensors sprinkled throughout ProLiant servers which fine tune the power consumption automatically leading to up to 97% improvement in energy efficiency, and Dynamic Power Capping which can triple a customer's datacenter capacity. And at the heart of today's newly announced HP ProLiant G7 servers is the AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor that can deliver double the performance of previous processors -which is great for core and memory-intensive workloads such as virtualization and database.

When you take HP's success delivering superior server innovations to enable a converged infrastructure, and combine that with AMD Opteron processors, we believe the value we collectively bring to customers can't be matched.

We'd love to hear what you think of our latest generation ProLiant servers so please let us know.

-Jim Ganthier