Hewlett-Packard’s announcement of the ProLiant Generation 8 server has managed to trigger some ripples throughout the IT industry, invoking discussion of an equally imposing scale. SiliconANGLE and Wikibon have been following the story from the start, and already quite a few pundits have come to theCube for an opportunity to give their angle on what Gen8 brings to the table.

One of the latest interviews was with Richard Fichera, an analyst at Forrester that has been following the server space. He also has unique insight as to what HP has been up to, thanks to a four year tenure as a director at the company’s blade server business.  The conclusion of the many different elements he covered during his chat with Dave Vellante is that, overall, he’s very impressed with what the hardware maker has managed to put together.

“This is pretty spectacular,” were the exact words he used when commenting on how Gen8 has the potential of being not just another hyped launch but also a big disruptor in the data center. He credits this to a number of things.

The fact that Gen8 features automatic updates (and automatic everything else) means downtime can be driven down significantly – both unscheduled, and the more expensive scheduled maintenance periods. This was one of the central highlights of the interview: Fichera’s proposition that all the resources that it takes to bring down a service add up to more than the losses caused by accidental blackouts.

He then talked about how Gen8 creates a window for traditional data center operators to live up to the performance standards set by cloud providers.  There are pros and cons to both, and the former is facing more and more pressure from the latter, but as technologies such as Gen8 emerge, the gap can be narrowed down.

Check out the video below for the rest of Fichera’s commentary.


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