HP is finally set to lift the lid on its long-awaited Project Moonshot later this morning, unveiling what analysts predict will be a new class of low-power, hyperscale servers that can scale up performance quickly. The event has been eagerly anticipated thanks to the endless stream of rhetoric from HP about its new, next generation ARM-based servers, which it claims have the potential to disrupt the market and spark a new wave of innovation in the data server industry.

HP set tongues wagging last Tuesday when it sent out invites for a webcast event on April 8, promising to tell us what Project Moonshot is all about:

“On April 8th, HP will once again disrupt the status quo by unveiling HP Moonshot, a new platform that was designed for the data center and built for the planet. Please join us at TheDisruption.com at 8am PT on Monday, April 8 for an online experience featuring presentations from Meg Whitman and Dave Donatelli as well as live Q&A with HP executives, ecosystem partners, customers and others. We hope you’ll join us to see what a new class of server can do.”

Project Moonshot is the culmination of almost one-and-a-half year’s tinkering with new, low-powered server designs for hyperscale environments. We first heard about the project back in November 2011, when HP unveiled a new ARM server design that was later expanded to incorporate an Intel Atom-powered dense server. HP made its prototype servers available to a number of customers to test them out, and its fine-tuning has been going on ever since.

The new server, which our sources tell us is code-named Gemini, will reduce both power and space requirements and has been designed for large data centers that handle web traffic and cloud implementations. HP CEO Meg Whitman made some big claims about Project Moonshot last month, saying that Moonshot would occupy 94% less space, use up 89% less energy, and cost 63% less than traditional X86 servers, which rely on power-hungry Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors. This was illustrated by a recent HP case study, which showed that a half-rack Moonshot server installation, costing $1.2 million and drawing 9.9kw of energy per hour, offered the same level of performance as a 1,600 server installation costing $3.3 million and drawing 91 kw of energy per hour.

Many analysts have speculated that the design should be especially interesting for companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google, each of which is constantly adding new servers to handle growing levels of traffic. For these Web scale giants, power and cooling of servers is problematic and can chew up to 30% or more of the operating expenses over the life of servers.  The reality for companies of this size is that they need to bleed as much productivity and power efficiency out of their servers as possible, and so implementing HP’s low-power cores would be one way to achieve this. One obstacle to adoption is that most server applications are written for x86 processors, however this is being negated by the growing support for ARM-based architectures by companies like Cloudera, Red Hat and Ubuntu.

Wikibon CTO and Senior Analyst David Floyer said he also believes that traditional data centers will consume these new products, especially those with backwards compatibility to x86. According to Floyer, “architectures like Moonshot will ultimately replace many of today’s conventional systems such as blade servers because these newer systems are packaged more elegantly and offer much better economics.”