Hewlett-Packard has finally unveiled the latest from Project Moonshot yesterday, a new class of hyperscale servers that feature low-power consumption and are more cost-effective than conventional data servers.

Reinventing the wheel

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The HP Moonshot 1500 Chassis houses 45 Atom Server Cartridges, network switch, management components, dual power supplies and cooling fans.  The servers could use chipsets from Intel, ARM, AMD, and Texas Instruments.  The first server cartridges used in Moonshot 1500 are based on the Intel S1260 Atom chipset, which has a 64bit processor with 2 2GHz cores, 4 threads cost only $65, and has a lower power requirement of 8.5 Watts compared to the Intel i7 processors with a potential 3.9 GHz, 8MB of cache, 32GB of DRAM and 4 cores/8 threads or lower GHz and more cores, but cost $295 and has a power requirement of over 100 Watts.

The server cartridges also has 1 MB of cache, 8GB of DRAM, Broadcom 1Gb Ethernet controller and a single 2.5 inch hard drive with 1TB SATA, ½ TB SATA or 200GB SATA SSD.

Semiconductor partners on board with HP for the Moonshot launch include Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Calxeda, and AppliedMicro.

HP Moonshot 1500, codenamed Gemini, promises to take up 94 percent less space, use up 89 percent less energy, and cost 63 percent less than traditional X86 servers that rely on Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors.

“With nearly 10 billion devices connected to the internet and predictions for exponential growth, we’ve reached a point where the space, power and cost demands of traditional technology are no longer sustainable,” said Meg Whitman, president and chief executive officer, HP. “HP Moonshot marks the beginning of a new style of IT that will change the infrastructure economics and lay the foundation for the next 20 billion devices.”

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Promising partners for HP Moonshot

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Scott Weller, HP’s VP and General Manager of Technology Services Support, discussed on theCube how this technology will revolutionize the industry, as it offers optimization of power, footprint and price.  As for the partners, Texas Instrument VP of Processors Brian Glinsman stated that Moonshot offers new opportunities such as data manipulation, analytics (user trends, videos, voice), and blending in large data farms with highly computational math.

AMD’s Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Server Business Suresh Gopalakrishnan, thinks that the maturity of hyperscale largely depends upon software,, and added that, “for folks whose workloads are very scale-out oriented, this is the right platform to go with.”

Intel is another eager partner ready to work on hyperscale technology in conjunction with HP.  Raejeanne Skillern, Director of Marketing, Cloud Computing at Intel stated that his company will invest highly in its Atom line-up, and will have its next generation silicon Atom released soon.

Moonshot’s stellar advantage

Project Moonshot was first announced in 2011 and HP made its prototype available to some of its customers since then.  And Moonshot 1500 is the first commercial product from the project.  HP expects Moonshot to “give the company the advantage it needs by securing a head start in the emerging market for hyperscale servers: small, low-power boxes that are specifically designed to run web-scale apps and big data software.”

Before HP’s announcement on Monday, the company announced the increase on its regular quarterly dividend to $0.1452 per share, which will be effective in May when it announces its quarterly dividend.  HP also went through a board shakeup when Raymond Lane stepped down as its chairman to be replaced on an interim basis by Ralph V. Whitworth.  John H. Hammergren and G. Kennedy Thompson also left HP’s board.