Hewlett-Packard is bringing high-density computing into the enterprise mainstream, John Gromala, the company’s senior director of hyperscale product management, told theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante at last week’s HP Discover summit. At the core of the hardware maker’s strategy is Moonshot, a line of low-power servers designed to help customers operate their data centers more efficiently at scale.

The product family, especially the proliant SL2500 and SL4500 configurations, have drawn a tremendous amount of interest from enterprise customers with data-intensive workloads like Hadoop, Gromala says. The latter model can be ordered with as many as sixty drives, providing two petabytes of optimized storage. Since launching Moonshot in April, HP expanded the range with cartridges featuring processors from Intel, AMD, ARM and Texas Instruments. Each server module, including the recently introduced Avoton-based ProLiant M300, is optimized for a specific use case or industry.

“I can change the personality of that server depending on which of those market segments I want to go after,” Gromala explains. “If I want to target telecommunications areas, I can configure that system with our Texas Instruments cartridges…or special offload engines to go ahead and deal with media transcoding, and it becomes a telco-focused box.”

Moonshot is central to HP’s converged infrastructure vision, which extends beyond hyperscale to software-led infrastructure with PODs. Besides being highly customizable, these data center containers also ship with an integrated control system that simplifies deployment and cuts power costs by half, Gromala boasts.

“The pods have really evolved over the year: it started almost like shipping containers where you put a few things in. But if you look at the pods today, they’ve really evolved where the walls are optimized for sound insulation, the power and cooling systems are optimized,” he says. “So they’re fully advanced data centers now that can get deployed at scale.”

Watch the interview below for more on HP’s plans for the software-defined data center and hyperscale, plus the role of the partner ecosystem in driving innovation.