HP Paves Path To Cloud With New ProLiant Gen8 Servers

HP's ProLiant BL660c and DL560 Gen8 servers feature higher server consolidation ratios and are physically smaller than their predecessors, and HP says these advancements can cut customers' total cost of ownership by up to 30 percent.

HP's ProLiant BL660c is based on the Intel Xeon E5-4600 processor family. It has three PCI 3.0 mezzanine slots, and supports one or two small form factor SAS or SATA hard drives or SSDs. HP's ProLiant DL560 uses two or four Intel Xeon E5-4600 processors, up to 48 DIMM modules and up to five hard drives or SSDs.

[Related: HP 'Project Voyager' Automates Management Of New ProLiant Gen8 Servers ]

The new servers feature a number of additional capabilities not found in HP's ProLiant Gen6 and Gen7 four-socket servers, which remain in production, John Gromala, director of product marketing for HP's Industry Standard Servers and Software business unit, said in an interview.

For instance, the HP ProLiant BL660c Gen8 blade servers now allow four processors to fit in a single slot, whereas such density required two of the older BL680c servers, Gromala said. And the DL560 Gen8 rack mount servers put four processors and 1.5 TB of storage in half the space needed for the older DL580 with 2 TB of storage, he said.

The new HP ProLiant L660c Gen8 blade servers also now work with three-rank DIMM modules, which Gromala said allows 24 GB of memory per module instead of the traditional 16 GB of memory per two-rank DIMM modules.

"By doing that, customers don't need to go to a larger number of DIMMs, but can instead get 25 percent more performance using 25 percent less power [than with two-rank modules]," Gromala told CRN. "So in a space-constrained environment, customers can cut overall costs by 20 percent because of increased performance and energy efficiency."

Gromala said the dense memory is suitable for virtualization-intense environments where virtual servers tend to share physical server memory. "It provides 30 percent more compute power versus two two-socket servers," he said.

HP compared its new servers against similarly-configured Dell servers, Gromala said. He expects the comparison to be roughly the same as with two-socket HP servers.

HP's ProLiant DL560 Gen8 and HP ProLiant BL660c Gen8 are now available worldwide and are priced starting at $5,912 and $7,970 respectively.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 26, 2012