Biz & IT —

HP launches new generation of “self-sufficient” servers

Designed to reduce the administrative burden of running datacenters, HP's new …

HPs Gen8 server line includes more built-in sensors and intelligence.
HPs Gen8 server line includes more built-in sensors and intelligence.
Photograph by Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard announced the next generation of its enterprise server line on February 13, along with a host of other datacenter focused improvements coming out of the company’s  Converged Infrastructure initiative. Available now to a few select customers,   The results of the latest round of that initiative, labeled Project Voyager, has focused on making servers easier to maintain in large datacenters by putting more intelligence throughout the server itself, as well as the rack. The new ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers are the centerpiece of the products that come out of Project Voyager. The servers, which will be generally released in March, are intended to reduce the manpower requirements associated with datacenter tasks—making them what HP claims are the “world’s most self-sufficient servers.”

“Silicon-based intelligence is cheap,” Mike Kendall, HP’s group manager for intelligent infrastructure, told Ars in an interview in advance of the announcement. “We looked at how datacenter operations are run at our customers, and asked, ‘What if we made everything smarter with more embedded processors, even in rack, and made it more self sufficient?’ ” Kendall said that HP has expanded on the technology previously built into HP servers as Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) management, providing “agent-less management, all down on the motherboard.”

That intelligence includes features like sensors in the server case and rack that automatically passes inventory data to HP’s management software, so administrators know the physical location of hardware when it’s installed. That allows datacenter administrators to link up the environmental information and workload information from servers with a specific rack location, and tie that information into cooling management and new load distribution. The whole-rack solution includes intelligent power distribution units that can sense which servers are connected to them—and if one has had both its power supplies connected to the same PDU, saving the embarrassment of failed redundancy.

The onboard intelligence also allows administrators to remotely provision the system from “bare metal”, pointing it at a specific server image in network storage for installation, further easing the burden of rolling out new hardware. By putting the provisioning intelligence in the server itself instead of in some other hardware or software agent technology as other “dynamic datacenter management” solutions (such as Cisco’s UCS or Dell’s Virtual Integrated System), the Gen8 servers give a similar level of bare-metal provisioning and dynamic re-allocation support while plugged into anyone’s network or storage hardware.

The Gen8 servers’ onboard sensors monitor the health of up to 1,600 different system parameters, and report them back to HP’s Insight Manager or other management software. The server’s onboard agent analyzes the data itself, Kendall said, and generates alerts when it detects a potential problem. HP is also looking to build services into its datacenter support, by offering a cloud version of Insight Manager, called Insight Online, that gives system managers web or smartphone access to server management and allows a company to share the data with a service provider. And through a service called Proactive Insight, HP will provide instant support for servers, using the cloud-collected data to accelerate system support.

HP has also used additional sensors and intelligence on the new servers, as well as some tricks of engineering, to improve servers’ energy efficiency. Internal temperature sensors can be used to individually tweak the speed of internal fans to reduce their power draw. Using what HP calls "3-D Sea of Sensors," with an average of 32 temperature sensors on the motherboard of each new server and additional heat sensors on video and network cards, the system can poll the temperature throughout the server and adjust fan power. And through engineering of memory—what the company calls HP Smart Memory—the Gen8 servers are able to run three DIMMs per channel at 1.35 volts instead of the usual 1.5 volts. (Standard memory still works in the systems, but without the dropped voltage.) All these tweaks add up, Kendall said, to an increase in power efficiency of 10 percent over similar configurations of the previous generation of servers.

HP also claims a number of basic design improvements to the Gen8 servers' chassis. For example, Kendall said, the size of the disk drive carriers in the system has been reduced, meaning that 25 drive carriers can be put in the front of a single DL386 server. There are also LED displays on drive carriers to indicate their state, including one to alert administrators when a drive is rebuilding so they don't pull the drive before it's complete.

While the services and Insight capabilities of the Gen8 servers are squarely aimed at corporate customers, Kendall said that the same capabilities are going into systems built with giant web datacenter customers in mind—the big cloud datacenter operators who typically have built out their own low-cost management environments. While they may not buy into HP’s own management software, he said, they’ll likely want to leverage the “basic bare-metal” features of the new servers’ intelligence through their own scripts and other interfaces.

Listing image by Photograph by Hewlett-Packard

Channel Ars Technica