“Mainstream CIOs: Stay Earthbound for now — HP Moonshot is not for you” warns Wikibon Analyst, Consultant, and former CIO Scott Lowe. Moonshot’s prices sound very appealing — $61,875 for a chassis filled with 45 HP ProLiant Moonshot servers with Intel Atom processes and an integrated switch.

But, Lowe warns, those processors top out at 8 GB of RAM and a single drive, and the cartridge only supports a few Linux variants. If someone would adapt a mainstream hypervisor — say Microsoft Hyper-V — to the Moonshot architecture, that might trigger big changes in the data center, he says, but at present the operating word is “if”.

For now Moonshot is targeted at massive scale-out, rather than scale-up, environments, including the hyperscale architectures developed at Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, and other large Cloud companies. It also is useful for supporting large-scale mobile environments or services and high-end analytics.

Of course, the Atom cartridge is just the first of several that are planned for Moonshot, which is unique in commercial server systems in that it is designed to support multiple processors from multiple vendors, many specialized to specific types of workloads. HP is expected to ship denser Atom-based cartridges this fall, he writes, and ARM, AMD, and TI processor cartridges in the future. Those plus a hypervisor could allow Moonshot to start replacing x86 servers, but that is a possible future event, not a present reality.

Like all Wikibon research, this Alert is available in full without charge on the Wikibon Web site. IT professionals are invited to register to join the Wikibon community. Membership allows them to post their own questions, tips, and research, as well as comment on published research on the site. Members also receive invitations to the periodic Peer Incite Meetings at which their peers present on how they are using advanced technologies to solve business and technical challenges.