HP today announced commercial availability of the HP Moonshoot 1500 its hyperscale computing platform. The current HP Moonshoot 1500 utilizes Atom S1260 nodes each armed with gigabit NICs a data drive and a single DIMM slot. The entire chassis is a 4.3U design and fits a total of 45 hot pluggable servers. More or less taking the concepts we have seen with multi-node systems (e.g. the popular Dell C6100 cloud computing platform we reviewed) and the Supermicro X9SBAA-F Atom S1260 based platform we reviewed. HP is betting that this platform, along with the new sockets it will introduce is going to be disruptive to the industry.
Paul Santeler kicked off the activities as VP and GM of HP’s Hyperscale platforms. I met Paul very briefly in person at the Intel Centerton launch event in San Francisco last year. It was fairly obvious this announcement would be forthcoming. It also explains the fact that the Centerton chips have been hard to come by in the channel.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5mFt_38JME
We have already seen that the Atom S1260 is a huge improvement over the previous generation Intel Atom CPUs. That makes them a great choice for the HP Moonshoot 1500. Further, we see that the HP Moonshoot 1500 went with an x86 architecture first. The ARM (64 bit) army is coming. It will be interesting to see if HP has adopted a common compute node form factor for the HP Moonshoot 1500. We recently posted a bit about how the industry needs a common compute node.
Right now, vendors are concerned with density, but one form factor needs to win in the end. The company hopes that the HP Moonshot 1500 will be setting those standards going forward.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21pIQUYMY1E
HP is hoping that the Moonshot 1500 series is the same magnitude disruption as the original x86 server introduction in the late 1980’s. Although a small portion of the market at the time, it is now the dominant architecture. HP is projecting this microcloud market to reach 19% of the $40B server industry going forward. Along these lines, HP has a microsite at http://thedisruption.com/. That domain clearly shows how big they thing the opportunity is.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF_I8kTywEU
Other highlights include the fact that the company plans to release new sockets and chips in the Moonshoot platform in the near future. Hopefully these follow the same form factors so one can mix and match in a given HP Moonshoot 1500 chassis. Very exciting news indeed!
Great PR regurgitation.
Who needs a $62k server with 45 limping ATOMs when you can get a quad-10core-server with E7 Xeons for lower price?
Moonshot is such a bad idea. You get 180 threads of lame ATOM power instead of 80 powerful Xeon threads that surely outperform this thing by miles. 360G of chunked-up RAM instead of up to 2T of badass RAM in one piece.
And don’t get me started on the stupid idea of having 45 individual drives without any redundancy or the lacking ability to connect this thing to a proper FC SAN.
We are full-on into the virtualization hype where every spare CPU cycle and RAM is relegated to applications that need it and HP introduces a system that’s just dozens of individual servers? Do they snort their overpriced printer ink now?
If they put out this crap for maybe $10k top, but $62k? WTF? Who the hell is buying this?
J D – The Dell C6100 XS23-TY3’s were tens of thousands new… and now can be had for $800. All perspective 🙂
Also, nobody is buying for $62k list. That is just a starting point for negotiations. In high-tech discounts are generally very large.
Hosting companies are who will definitely buy it.. They don’t want virtualization, they want hardware separation for their instances.
Also there are XEON processing modules coming out for it too.. Don’t think ATOM only.. ARM, APU, XEON, etc are coming out shortly.