HP Announces Breakthrough for Power Services for Data Centers
HP has announced a project designed to advance what it is calling “extreme low-energy technologies” for web, cloud, and hyper-scale environments. “Project Moonshot” was developed at HP Labs and encompasses a new development platform, lab, and industry ecosystem that will enable HP’s partners to find significant savings related to power services for data centers for large-scale, data-intense computing.
Cost and Energy Savings for Power Services for Data Centers
According to HP Fellow, Partha Ranganathan, HP customers can see dramatic changes in their costs related to power services for data centers.
“Our research suggests that for the kinds of workloads and applications that we’re now seeing in hyper-scale environments, we ought to be able to reduce energy consumption by 89 percent, use 94 percent less space and see costs that are 63 percent lower compared to traditional systems,” Ranganathan says. “The three parts of Project Moonshot together represent a paradigm shift in the industry, and they are all backed up by, and built upon, a decade of deep, strong, sustained research at HP Labs.”
At the heart of Project Moonshot, is the design for “extreme computing environments.” The new hardware from HP uses low-power processors, shared chipsets, power cooling, and storage.
Technology Development
The first part of the project was announced in 2008 with the “microblade.” This new technology from HP Labs introduced the idea of using low-powered processors successfully within the enterprise.
HP then worked to create server tools that could calculate the power versus performance issues that can occur when running servers on extreme low-energy processors. It is important to note that these low-energy processors were essentially designed originally for the mobile phone market. This technology is now taking on new life through its adaption for the server market.
HP Labs were able to show microblades could be deployed in servers with incredible density due to their very small form factor. Ultimately, these systems used only a faction of the power services for data centers of their X86 predecessors.
New Application Uses and Future Developments
The researchers at HP Labs also helped identify new application uses and optimization opportunities for these new low-energy servers. Many of the benchmarking tools and calculators have been developed with Discovery Lab for precise application testing so IT professionals and specifically determine the best utilization of these new servers and the type of power they require.
The next goal for HP’s Intelligent Infrastructure Lab will be to combine the vision of Project Moonshot with other HP technologies, including their photonic interconnects to improve the speed of blade circuitry in order to find further savings of power services for data centers. They are also working to further develop the memristor market (short for memory resistor), allowing the possible development of even more energy-efficient computing systems. These systems can have memories that retain information even after the power is off meaning that there would be no wait time for the system to boot up after powering on the computer.
“That will create a game changing nanostore design,” Ranganathan says. “We think that too will really disrupt the market and we’re very excited about that as well.”
