Today’s announcement of the initial components of HP’s multi-year, multi-project Project Moonshot  program for developing very large, very low power servers is an inflection point equivalent to the introduction of the x86 architecture in the 1990s, says Paul Santeler, VP/GM of HP’s Hyperscaler Business, Industry Standard Services & Software.

The program has three initial components: the Redstone server platform designed to work in a federated architecture for minimal power use and heat generation, HP Discovery Lab where development partners and customers can experiment with the hardware, and the HP Pathfinder partnership program to bring together software, hardware, and other development partners to create the tools and peripherals users will need.

Speaking on a live SiliconAngle.tv Webcast from the Moonshot announcement site immediately after the formal announcement, he said that Redstone is not intended as a replacement for HP’s x86 servers but is designed specifically for large Web services and other clients who are growing, and installing very large servers, at an incredible rate. One of their largest problems is managing the heat and power in their data centers, to the point that they have begun building in arctic countries.

“That helps with the cooling, but it doesn’t help with the power,” Santeler told SiliconAngle Founder John Furrier and Wikibon.org co-founder and Chief Analyst David Vellante. “This isn’t good for business, and it isn’t good for the environment.”

To met the needs of those customers, Santeler said, HP did something no one else has done before – looked at how you design a data center to meet their specific needs, which include minimum power use and minimum cooling demand, and then worked back to design the servers for that data center.


Watch live video from SiliconANGLE.com on Justin.tv

The Redstone servers are the result. They are designed for applications with huge I/O but relatively low CPU load; for instance servers that serve up pages and download and upload unencrypted video or run Hadoop big data analysis.

Glenn Keels, Director of Marketing for the Hyperscaler Business, brought a Redstone motherboard to show on camera.  It appeared to be about 8” long and had four Calxeda EnergyCore ARM Cortex processors mounted on it.  Eighteen of those fit in a tray, with four trays per chassis, and up to 2,800 processor chips in a single rack. At full utilization each server draws 5-6 watts of power. At idle they use almost no power.

Moonshot, however, is much more than a new low-power server family. It is a full converged infrastructure designed to support the needs of this specific set of very large customers. For instance,  the architecture is designed to allow users to mix processors with either spinning disk or flash storage to meet their specific needs. HP is prepared to customize individual servers or multiple-server orders for customers, Santeler said. And the trays fit in the HP ProLiant 6500, replacing the normal x86 processors. That, said Keels, means that the power units and other infrastructure surrounding the processors are all standard and proven with HP’s full worldwide support already in place.

The Pathfinder program is vital to the development of Moonshot, both men emphasized. The program is designed after the development partner program HP announced for its blade servers, which, like this program, started small but at last count had grown to include more than 300 partners. “Many of the tools that users will need with the Redstone hardware will come from our partners,” Keens said.

And, they emphasized, this is just the beginning, with more announcements to come. The full architecture includes switches and other hardware, software tools to support those, and a complete management fabric designed to support open-stack, high-volume use.


Watch live video from SiliconANGLE.com on Justin.tv