Like the traditional enterprise crowd, the world’s largest data center operators are consolidating the historically disparate components of their infrastructure in an effort to save space and simplify management. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is moving to capitalize on the trend this morning with the launch of a new hyperscale storage server that can pack as much as 640 terabytes of capacity in a standard 4U chassis.

The CL5200 owes its density to a minimalist design that removes most of the extras included in the vendor’s regular servers to make room for some 80 “large form-factor” hard drive slots. A machine can either be equipped with mechanical disk and serve as a low-cost storage destination for mundane data like infrastructure logs, or configured to hold speedy flash capable of supporting high-performance analytic applications. The latter use case greatly benefits from the fact that the hard drives are in the same chassis as the system’s compute component, which makes accessing the data inside much faster than from a standalone array located halfway across the network.

Organizations with particularly performance-intensive applications have the option of fitting the CL5200 with an extra compute node for extra processing power, according to HPE. The company also provides multiple choices of management software. including Scality Inc.’s RING platform for orchestrating server-attached storage. Support for the offering was added as part of a recently expanded partnership between the two vendors that saw Meg Whitman’s firm make a strategic investment in the startup reportedly worth $10 million.

Considering that many of the companies in the hyperscale segment the CL5200 targets buy upwards of thousands of servers every quarter, landing even a single joint customer could mean a lot of business for HPE and Scality. The revenue potential increases even further when taking networking equipment into account, an opportunity that the technology giant is also going after today with the addition of four new models to its Altoine 6900 family of x86 switches.

HPE claims that it’s now the only major data center provider that can serve as a one-stop shop for hyperscale companies. Both the CL5200 and the new switches are available immediately.  

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