HP’s Project Voyager announcements last week of a new generation of servers and storage with advanced management automation were focused tightly on solving real data center operations problems and, in the process, saving money in the operations budget. Now Wikibon CTO David Floyer has published the results of Wikibon’s independent analysis of the potential savings from HP Gen8 automation based on a standard medium-sized company. Wikibon is inviting comments on the figures from this ongoing research.

Floyer calls the ProLiant Gen8 “a major upgrade in managing racks of servers and disks with greater efficiency….” While Wikibon’s potential savings estimates differ from the estimates HP presented in its announcement, the article confirms HP’s promise that users will realize significant measurable savings from this new technology. The article compares HP Gen7 operational costs to projected Gen8 cost and concludes that upgrading to Gen8 can save users approximately 15% of their IT server budgets. Much of this savings comes from a large number of individually small details ranging from improved power supplies to a reduction in operational software costs.

Floyer’s main criticism is that HP missed the chance to provide even larger operational savings by designing Gen8 hardware to operate at a higher temperature than Gen7. An increase of even a few degrees of operating temperature could provide significant savings in power/cooling to customers.

The question for CIOs then becomes whether this savings is compelling enough to:
Convince present HP customers to accelerate their server replacement schedules.
Convince HP customers considering moving to low-cost generic hardware to reconsider that strategy.
Convince customers of HP competitors to consider replacing their present hardware with HP Gen 8.

Answering those questions would require an analysis of such issues as the availability and cost of CAPEX, potential return that might be realized by selling the hardware replaced by Gen8 systems, and the organization’s overall financial situation and business goals. While this article does not attempt to answer these questions, the independent figures do provide a basis for internal analysis of the optimal response to the Gen8 announcement.