HP has launched 2 new servers today – both based on ARM microprocessors. The most significant is the Moonshot m400, which uses Applied Micro’s new 64-bit chips – a first in the industry. So the wait is over – we’ve got to congratulate ARM and everyone in the ecosystem. It’ll take some time, but at last the chip has a chance in the Enterprise server market.
HP also launched the m800 server based on the Texas Instruments 32-bit ARM SoC, a dense solution optimised for ‘real-time data processing of high volume, complex data, such as pattern analysis’.
As part of AllianceOne programme HP is also launching its Moonshot ARM-64 Developer programme to help developers test and port code to the new chip remotely on servers in its ProLiant Moonshot Discovery Labs.
Moonshot is about physicalisation
I initially felt uncomfortable about HP’s decision to put its Moonshot server in its Converged System business. It was an innovative hardware product lacking applications – the reverse of almost all other products (including HP’s), which have been designed, integrated and orchestrated to provide rapid deployment of existing applications. The most advanced of these – IBM’s PureData and Oracle’s Exadata for example – are workload-optimised servers sold to the owners of data warehouses and analytic processes who don’t want to know about the underlying hardware.
Subsequently I’ve discovered that it isn’t the whole range, but rather just the CS100 which is in Mark Payne’s EMEA Converged Systems business. I also relaxed a little when HP has addressed 2 major issues with its initial offerings by adding the use of external 3Par to its (previously exclusive) internal storage and no longer insisting that every Moonshot chassis is shipped fully populated.
When HP launched the CS100 I became less concerned – this is a Hosted Desktop Infrastructure (HDI) solution based on the Moonshot m700 with incorporates AMD’s Opteron APUs and Citrix’s XenDesktop software. I was intrigued that it had supported ‘physicalised’ as opposed to ‘virtualised’ desktops. It will be similar in other ‘microservers[1]’ where Intel Atom, 32-bit and 64-bit ARM, x86 APUs and other small core processors will compete against multiple virtual machines running on hypervisors on top of rich processors.
Despite the insistence of the software industry that IT solutions should always start with applications, it’s typical of HP (and not necessarily a bad thing) to take a more hardware-centric approach.
Hyperscale is largely an ODM – not OEM – business
Public Cloud companies such as Amazon, Google, eBay and even Microsoft start with an application idea – never with pre-packaged software. A few of these are then amplified through hyperscale data centres to reach hundreds of millions of users. One side effect of the influence of hyperscale computing in 2014 has been the rapid rise of Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution. We expect to see other LAMP software components such as JuJu and Charms to follow in coming months. Hyperscale data centres usually buy chips from Intel as ODMs rather than from HP and other server vendors as OEMs.
A big opportunity for workload-customised (not optimised) microservers
However there is a mass of Tier 2 and Tier 3 Cloud service providers to add to HPC customers who could benefit from microservers to deploy and amplify their own application ideas. In this sense Moonshot machines will be ‘workload-customised’, rather than ‘workload-optimised’. It’s interesting that there are already 200 or so customer and developer Proof of Concepts running in the Discovery Labs – it will be even more impressive when Moonshot is successful enough for HP to tell us how many they’ve sold.
HP isn’t alone – we’re going to see lots of other microservers and a few other 64-bit ARM chips launched soon. Don’t get too carried away – it’s going to take time for this market to develop.
Further Reading
[1] I use ‘microserver’ as a general term – HP doesn’t as it uses the name for a small server designed for SMEs
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