HP extends G7 servers for converged infrastructure

HP's Proliant DL980 supports eight CPU sockets and up to 2TB memory

HP has announced updates to its converged infrastructure products aimed at streamlining datacentre operations, including blade servers with converged network adapters (CNAs) as part of its Virtual Connect FlexFabric architecture, and enhancements to its BladeSystem Matrix for automated provisioning in a private cloud.

The new G7 Proliant servers, three rack-mount and seven blade systems, are designed to scale up to greater memory capacities than previous HP servers to meet the needs of virtualisation and other demanding requirements, and include the first Proliant models with Intel's Nehalem EX processors.

For example, the rack-mount DL980 is an eight-socket system configurable with up to 2TB of memory for hosting databases and other enterprise applications.

Meanwhile, the four-socket BL680c is the first blade server to support up to 1TB of memory, according to HP, and sports six network ports for up to 60Gbit/s of I/O bandwidth.

Also noteworthy is the BL2x220c, designed for high-performance compute applications. This shoehorns two twin-socket servers onto a single blade, enabling customers to cram up to 32 servers into a single 10U blade chassis.

A key feature of the blade servers, according to HP, is integrated 10Gbit/s CNAs with protocol offload support for TCP/IP, Fibre Channel over Ethernet and iSCSI, providing greater flexibility in data and storage network connectivity. These adapters are based on technology from Emulex.

This technology is also supported in an updated 24-port HP Virtual Connect module, which links the blade chassis to external SAN and LAN resources. The module additionally supports HP's Flex-10 technology that can consolidate four virtual network connections of variable bandwidth along a single 10Gbit/s link.

Peter Mansell, HP UK's BladeSystem business manager, said this development is the next step for network and storage connectivity, and that the Virtual Connect technology is one of HP's biggest differentiators in the blade server market.

Also updated is HP's BladeSystem Matrix which packages pre-built blade systems with Matrix Orchestration software to automate provisioning of resources as required by specific applications.

This now integrates with HP Server Automation to automatically provision the applications, and includes automated storage tiering, allocating applications to the relevant tier based on performance and availability requirements.

HP also unveiled a tool designed to better manage power consumption across the datacentre, delivering savings on energy bills of up to $5m (£3.3m) for every 1,000 servers, according to the firm.

HP Intelligent Power Discovery "takes power management to the next level", according to Mansell, providing oversight of power consumption across all systems and automatically matching consumption to the required performance level.

"It goes right down to the individual component level, looking at whether each fan on each server needs to be going," he said.

Paul Kember, HP's head of industry standard servers for UK and Ireland, said that the firm is "uniquely positioned" to help customers turn their datacentre into a flexible, private cloud.

HP has long-standing expertise in servers, storage, networking and management tools, plus the supply chain to deliver converged infrastructure to customers, he claimed.

"It's about unleashing the potential of the datacentre, freeing up operational costs and diverting resources towards innovation instead of just keeping the lights on," he said.

Other servers announced today include the rack-mount DL580 and DL585, four-socket systems based on Intel's Nehalem and AMD's Operon 6100 processors respectively. The latter makes possible a system with up to 48 processor cores.

The BL460 and BL465 are two-socket blades based on Intel and AMD chips, while the Intel-based BL490 is similar but can be configured with more memory.

Rounding off the new servers are the BL620c and BL685. The BL620c is designed as a four-socket server but which can instead be configured with just two and extra memory for virtualisation, HP said.

The BL685 is the AMD-based version of the BL680, and offers "four-socket performance at a two-socket price", according to Mansell.

As part of the same announcement, HP also released new de-duplication software and storage products.

HP StoreOnce delivers a single, unified architecture for de-duplication across backup clients, storage appliances and scale-out storage systems, the firm said, so that customers need only one tool for all de-duplication needs.

Finally, the HP StorageWorks P4800 BladeSystem SAN and the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array cluster are designed to ease consolidation of servers, storage and desktops by creating virtual resource pools of capacity, the firm said.

The P4800 BladeSystem SAN provides shared storage of up to 63TB in storage capacity, while the EVA consists of several arrays that create a single resource pool of up to 2PB, or 2,000TB, HP said.