UPDATED 13:35 EDT / FEBRUARY 17 2012

Gen8 Wrap Up: Why the Idiot-Proof Server is HP’s Best Yet

It was a busy week for HP with news of their latest server, Gen8.  At the event we brought you live coverage with a host of analysts and executives expressing their thoughts on the new project, and here we take a look at this week’s highlights from the event.

One of the best ways to understand what Gen8 is all about is by listening in on a panel discussion with our founder John Furrier and Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and David Floyer. They discuss Hewlett-Packard’s Gen8, the new ‘idiot-proof’ server that packs a lot of automation and big data-awareness.  The panel revolved around Floyer’s take on things; a tech industry veteran who has followed the server market since his days with IBM.

Vellante kicked off the conversation by talking a bit about the IT industry and data center. Data-driven environments are expanding within today’s enterprises in light of a more urgent need to solve data-related problems they’ve not tackled before, and HP is addressing this market. In response, Floyer provided a brief overview of exactly what’s happening, a topic that is fleshed out more as we go deeper into the session.

According to the Wikibon co-founder, server architectures are shifting from being optimized to handle structured data to processing unstructured data. The number of servers that fall in the latter category are multiplying as data is moving away from the array and back into the servers, and this is where the problems above come in the picture.

The breakdown

I/O, provisioning and growing footprints are the three main concerns here, as Furrier highlighted.  Floyer’s angle on this is that provisioning requires a lot of human resources relative to the size of the deployment–the very same administrators that statistically account for the most downtime in enterprise IT environments. This situation that can be mitigated both in terms of cost and human error thanks to the great deal of automation built into the HP ProLiant Generation 8.

Moving on, Floyer addressed some of the improvements Hewlett-Packard says its product can deliver. The promise of a 70 percent reduction in power is a technicality that can be shrugged off in favor of a more genuine 35 percent, but this is not to say Gen8 losses its value proposition.  The 3-man panel agreed that a great deal of savings can be achieved with the new server in data facilities, let alone when counting in the overhead cuts in HR and other departments, a commonality in today’s struggling economy. A 15 percent reduction in overhead associated with server maintenance is the estimate in this case.

In this particular context, Floyer believes that the Gen8 is probably the best server Hewlett-Packard has come up with so far, which is an impressive title considering the sheer size of the hardware maker’s portfolio.

Later on, Furrier and Floyer spent some time talking about the impact of the trends that prove to be the driver behind Gen8 and other industry developments around big data. IT budgets are actually going up, thanks to new applications that offer a whole new way of doing things.  The rise in spending is aligned with the increasing returns big data software, powered by the appropriate infrastructure.

All of this in turn affects the job marketplace, and Floyer managed to address the shifts in this area as well. He expanded on the topic of a recent post by Vellante: how do these trends impact the workers managing these deployments?  Storage admins’ responsibilities are moving in closer to the applications that run on top of the infrastructure, and in order to fulfill those successfully they too have to adopt. They need to be able to answer the question of “what can I do to help the applications run better.”

For more, including additional number and stats the panel pulled and the full analysis of where storage and servers stand today, check out the video below. We’ve been covering the launch extensively throughout the week, as did Wikibon, and the conclusions overlap at more than just one bulletin.

Gen8 is a big data server. It manages to address the full spectrum of areas where cost reduction can be made achievable (or at least a very big portion of it,) and does seem to justify the 2 years and $300 million that went into the massive R&D operation.


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