Hewlett-Packard has been very active in the data center this week. The company unveiled a new server product that’s expected to blow its predecessor out of the water, and released a backup and recovery case study.

The  HP ProLiant DL380 Gen8 runs on two of Intel’s Sandy Bridge-based Xeon E5-2600 processors, which have a combined total of eight compared to the six that came with Gen7. The new DL380 comes with up to 768GB of RAM; it can support multiple types of random access memory and storage controllers; and has an acceptable variety of drive bays and ports.

Another update from HP is that it managed to snag a major customer from NetApp.  HR firm Hudson switched to LeftHand in its UKs disaster recovery sites to be more cost-efficient.

Hudson set up a London facility to support the roll out of a new CRM system. That center was equipped with NetApp storage, but when the company had to open a secondary site to accommodate its growing infrastructure, it decided to rip and replace with HP. This made it possible to implement synchronous replication across the two locations without the extra hassle that a multi-vendor environment would have required.

HP gave the best bang for the buck, with lower cost and more functionality,” said IT director Bas Alblas. “We have reduced storage rack space and power usage by 50%, with three times more storage capacity and storage performance doubled. We have also achieved 50% more users per Citrix server and reduced the Citrix virtual server count by 30%.”

The company is citing a 50 percent reduction in power usage and doubled storage efficiency thanks to the new hardware.

Earlier this month HP unveiled the X9730 scale-out file server, which competes with alternative systems from DDN and EMC Isilon.