HP’s new Moonshot: 1,800 servers per rack, 3M visitors/day on 720 watts

HP’s new Moonshot: 1,800 servers per rack, 3M visitors/day on 720 watts:

HP has been looking for a big, ambitious, risk-it-all project to turn its sinking fortunes around, so it’s perhaps fitting that its new server project is called Moonshot.
Today, HP announced that customers can now buy an HP Moonshot server system. The company claims that Moonshot use up to 89 percent less energy, 80 percent less space, and will cost 77 percent less than traditional servers.
What does that mean in absolute terms? A single server rack can hold 1,800 Moonshot servers, so you can really cram a lot of the things into a small footprint in a datacenter. Their space consumption is 1/8 that of traditional servers, HP says.

Source: HP

If you prefer your servers with a purse, here’s a stock photo of HP’s Moonshot you might like.

The servers run on Intel’s low-power S1200 processor/system-on-a-chip, which draws just 6 to 10 watts, depending on the chip model. HP claims that, based on initial tests, it will be able to run its entire website, HP.com, using a Moonshot server that draws “the energy equivalency of a dozen 60-watt light bulbs.” HP.com attracts 3 million visits per day, according to the company, so running a site of that scale on just 720 watts is a pretty good feat — it’s the equivalent power draw of just two or three tower PCs.
The first HP Moonshot 1500 server, meant for web hosting, is a 4.3U server enclosure with 45 Intel-based servers inside, plus a network switch and additional components. If you’re not a datacenter ninja, 4.3U means it’s approximately 7 inches high by 19 inches wide and can slide into a server rack, taking up slightly more than 4 standard server slots.
It’s meant for datacenters that need to scale quickly to adapt to changing server loads — such as providers of cloud services.
It will cost $61,875.
Images: Courtesy HP

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