HP has always been an innovator. In the 1970s its founders, literally working in a garage, brought out the first minicomputer, designed as the first local system that could be used in a lab or small office in an era when computers still filled large rooms. In the early 1980s it pioneered desktop printing, still a major market for the company, to go with the first desktop computers. In the mid-1980s it developed one of the first Unix versions designed for production environments. Then it turned on a dime in 1989 and brought out the first x86 server. Industry analysts said HP was attacking its own Unix market, but what it really did was grab the lead in the next generation of servers. Today DEC, Data General, and Prime Computer are all gone, and HP still leads the x86 market.

The Day the (IT) World Changed

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In recent years industry observers, including those at Wikibon.org, have been saying that HP has lost its edge, that is no longer the innovator. That changed on Monday, April 8, 2013. “Ten years from now we will look back on today and say, ‘this was the day the industry changed,’” said HP EVP and GM of Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking for the Enterprise Business David Donatelli, in an interview in the Cube at the Moonshot event in New York City immediately after the announcement. He is correct.

Because today HP has made another leap, introducing the first mass produced, commercial commodity servers, the Moonshot 1500 series. And just as in 1989, it is announcing the successor to its own most successful product, the x68 servers and specifically the HP DL380, its most popular server. But if HP didn’t, someone else would sooner or later, probably sooner, and HP be playing catchup. Now everyone else is.

For HP management, Donatelli said, the decision was easy, ‘We’ve always been the pioneer. We will continue to be the pioneer.”

Compared to the DL380, he says, the Moonshot 1500 uses 20% less space, 80% less power, and is 77% less expensive for the same amount of power. It is built from the same components, including multi-core AMD CPUs and flash storage all on the single cartridge, that are in smartphones and tablets. These boards also include built-in networking and, if desired, disk storage, and a single standard chassis can contain 450-1800 cores, depending on the configuration. Thus it is the ultimate converged hardware system – converged not just in the single box but actually on each processor board.

12 Lightbulbs

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One measure of what that means, says Donatelli, is that HP could run its global Web page, which gets 3 million hits a day, on the equivalent of the power draw of 12 60-watt lightbulbs.

Of course it also is a different kind of beast, without the built-in controls and features of the DL380. A company cannot just swap in the Moonshot 1500 and expect the same software to run on it. But it is exactly what the hyperscale companies – Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, etc. – want and have been building themselves. These commodity servers are built to support very large virtualized environments. Increasing amounts of new enterprise software will be designed to run in this new environment. Over time enterprises will start adopting this new architecture, as the software they need becomes available, driven in part by the need to conserve space and cut power and cooling demand to pack more computing capability into existing data centers.

As more compute power, storage, and faster networking become available at a lower price, Donatelli says, IT professionals find uses for it, developing new applications to solve new problems and in some cases to do things that aren’t practical on the x86 generation servers. It will not happen in a day or a year, but he has no doubt of where the industry is going.

The Head Start Advantage

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The old saying is that you can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs. Donatelli has another view, based on HP’s history. It was the first to bring out x86 servers, and to this day it leads the industry. The Moonshot 1500, he says, is actually HP’s second generation of commodity servers. “We learned a lot from the first generation. I’m sure that as the market grows other companies will move into it, but so far I haven’t seen anything from any of our competitors.” That means HP has a two-year lead on IBM, Cisco, and Dell. “And we intend to accelerate [commodity system] development, not slow down.”

The Moonshot hardware architecture allows easy swapping in of different components. Donatelli says HP will introduce a series of Moonshot versions customized to support specific compute loads. He did not give specifics, but it is easy to imagine, for instance, a server customized to handle next-generation ERP that incorporates huge amounts of machine-generated data to supplement the traditional structured data and give a more complete picture of all stages of the supply chain and manufacturing process. Or a next-generation CRM that incorporates Big Data providing a fuller picture of customers and prospects.

Today, he says, “The industry focus is on optimizing the x86 development curve. We are leaping forward to an entirely new curve based on commodity components. The whole concept is mass-customization. We can bring out new servers three times faster because we are not waiting on traditional innovation cycles. With all our new partners we can bring out new systems very quickly, all going into a standard enclosure.”

Those partners are another way in which HP is gaining a head start on the industry. It is building an ecosystem to support its new generation servers. So far, he says, it has about 25 partners in the supply chain, but more will be added over time.

As for market, he says HP estimates the total server market to be about US$40 billion. IDC says that in a few years hyperscale will be 19% of that, and Moonshot is a great fit for hyperscale. HP of course sells to all of those large Cloud-based companies, and they are already involved in the design process. But HP has also gotten enthusiastic response to its first generation systems from its enterprise customers as well.

HP believes it has the tiger by the tail, and it intends to hold on and build on its lead in the next generation market, regardless of what that means to its present-generation x86 business.

The first Moonshot 1500 boxes will ship this week with the initial cartridges, and customers can order now.