Hardware maker Hewlett-Packard is facing a lot of competition, even beyond the race for the title of most eco-friendly data center vendor. HP is facing its old rival Dell as well as others in the storage space, an area towards which the two PC manufacturers are attracted in light of the need to diversify in a market disrupted by mobile. Today, HP made its latest push with the launch of the ProLiant Generation 8 “smart” servers. The basic concept behind what was a $300 million R&D effort was to make a box that’s as automated and self-sustaining as possible, with a bunch of services wrapped up around it.

Gen8 follows the HP Moonshot line we also covered at the time, but is not overshadowed at all.  The new line features things such as automated updating and a big emphasis on minimizing the footprint, among other things.

Wikibon analyst David Floyer describes this as an “incremental update” and cites the improved asset management, the ability to send magnitudes of data from systems and storage and the “idiot proofing” as the most significant advances.

Hewlett-Packard has debuted quite a few storage initiatives lately, from HP Discover into present day.  The company has proved to be a superb indicator of several cross-market shifts: HP and Dell paying a little less attention to PCs, and the modern data center driven by the need to handle massive big data workloads.

Overall, this business has been rather complicated on HP’s end. Wikibon’s Dave Vellante highlighted how the company has done a rather good job integrating 3PAR and its other high-value storage acquisitions into its portfolio, all the while keeping up with the rest of the market and showing solid growth figures to shareholders.