HP Moonshot ‘Software Defined Servers’ With Atom Chips In Cartridges

Moonshot Highlights

• HP’s first production software defined server, a new class of servers
• Launches the HP Moonshot Server, with a server cartridge based on the Intel Atom S1200 processor and Moonshot 1500 chassis
• The initial offering is optimised for dedicated hosting
• Supports up to 45 server cartridges in a chassis, up to 10 chassis in a rack and up to 450 servers per rack.
• Enables a number of server and storage configurations in a shared fabric, management and power and cooling architecture
• Future server cartridges will be launched a few times per year, including both single and quad server cartridges
• New cartridges will include x86 and ARM, APUs, FPGAs, and more, and will address an expanding collection of workloads.
• With quad server cartridges, HP Moonshot Servers will support up to 1800 servers per rack.
• An important launch, but just the beginning, growing from a small revenue opportunity initially, growing to a significant share of the overall server market

Hold on to your hats, this is going to get a bit technical – have a look at our acronym buster if you need help with a few definitions. Having spent some time on its development systems with partners HP has launched its first production software-defined chassis and server cartridge. You’ll want to find out more about what it’s doing and our take on why.

What’s HP Announcing?

HP argues that serving the explosion of data from the Internet of Things will prohibitively expensive in energy and money by 2020 using conventional servers and data centres. It calls for a radical change in design to cartridge-based systems and low-powered processors.
Today it’s launching the Moonshot 1500 Chassis, which has space for 45 hot-plug cartridges. The chassis has 3 common-slot power supplies, a management module and 5 redundant, hot-plug fan modules.
The first cartridge server is based on the Intel Atom S1260 2.0GHz, 2-core chip, which has 8GB memory, an integrated dual-port 1Gb Ethernet NIC, 500GB or 1TB hard disk or SSD. Power is 19W per cartridge under load including switch and chassis adding to a total of 900W per chassis and up to 90KW per rack, which will be difficult to handle (it notes that some customers currently go up to 30W per rack). Nevertheless it’s mind-boggling to think about squeezing 450 servers into a single rack, let alone the potential 1.8k, once the quad-server cartridges become available. We suspect that the first deployments will be considerably less ambitious and power-hungry. The first operating systems supported are RHEL 6.4, SLEX 11 SP2 and Ubuntu 12.04.
In terms of configuration the cartridges can be configured as compute, storage or combination nodes. Servers are connected into a fabric, which allows for traffic isolation and stacking using low-latency switches. For each Server on Chip (SoC) HP will support cluster fabric configurations with high-speed communication lanes between servers, a ring-fabric to allow minimum and direct card-to-card communication paths – all of which is suitable for applications where ‘efficient localized traffic’ is beneficial. Storage can be configured as local hard disk or flash, low-cost boot and logging for ‘8-way drive slicing’ (which HP claims cuts the cost of a boot drive by 87%), or distributed storage and RAID via expansion. The storage approach uses direct-attached SAS switches with external storage addressed via Ethernet iSCSI – there is no Fibre Channel support in this system. Initially the servers will have up to a maximum of 5TB per node.
HP uses its integrated Lights Out (iLO) Chassis Manager for aggregating all nodes with a satellite controller to a common set of management interfaces with a single Ethernet port gateway, and IPMI and serial console for each server. It performs functions such as standard health logging and monitoring temperatures. It can perform true out-of-band firmware updates independent of the operating system and avoiding any disruption to the application layer.

New Systems For Hosting Workloads

HP has firmly positioned its first production systems at the hosting market, specifically for dedicated hosting, Web front-end, MemCache, Big Data, desktop infrastructure and accelerators, claiming a 77% lower TCO for dedicated hosting. It will introduce new cartridges to expand into new workloads, adding analytics, Telco and gaming in its Q3 CY13 and FSI and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
The low-cost of each server gives hosters the opportunity to offer them to PaaS subscribers as dedicated physical servers, which many may find more acceptable form a security point of view than equally cheap multi-tenanted Cloud solutions.
As well as ARM chips HP expects to add APU chips combining Compute and Graphics processing, which will be useful in VDI deployments and specialised processors for markets such as Oil and Gas exploration, the FPGAs will be useful for adding real time security filters.
In Project Moonshot HP has been working closely with technology partners[1] and has launched its Pathfinder Innovation Ecosystem, which is designed to speed up the time to implement solutions to customer needs. It also has introduced a solution builder program and Moonshot Concierge support which incorporates its Discovery Labs, service and consulting and financial options.

Some Conclusions – An Important Launch, But Small Incremental Revenue For Now

After all the fuss ARM has been making about its opportunities in the server market it’s poignant that HP’s first production server uses Intel’s Atom processor instead. Still this is early days and HP will definitely support ARM in the next year, planning to use Texas Instruments’ KeyStone II SoC ARM Cortex-A15 cores in the first ones. As the world leading vendor of x86 (and Intel) servers HP has to be careful that its endorsement of the microserver market doesn’t upset the apple cart, which is why it differentiates the new systems as something new.
HP takes a technology innovation approach to its server business, which tends to downplay the importance of workloads. In this highly technical launch its description of potential workloads lacked the depth of vision shown by some of its competitor, although its partner approach allows it to co-develop these ’software-defined servers’ with its customers. It rightly sees the importance of workload selection to the importance of Moonshot, but is going to leave it to other partners and its customers for definitions.
While it talks a bout a ‘revolution in the datacenter’, we believe that microservers will be a small incremental addition to its server revenues in 2013. Initially HP should be able to win a number of deals with large public hosting and Cloud providers for large hyperscale low-energy servers – as the new systems should offer cheaper systems than the self-built and white box deployments many have used in the last few years.