As HP leads the world of IT into a new, all-encompassing compute environment, it has fundamentally redesigned the hardware underpinning this environment, making it significantly smaller, faster, cheaper and more efficient, says HP.
Andrew McNiven, HP South Africa industry standard servers category manager, explains that high-performance computing is only needed for actual processing and analysis of big data. "You don't need HPC, or even a two-socket server to collect this data. For much of what the enterprise requires, you need efficient, low-power compute capacity that does just what it should, extremely quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively. But, nonetheless, the world has exponentially grown infrastructure requirements to meet new needs. Meeting new demands using infrastructure as we know it today is not sustainable in terms of space, energy and cost. Enter Moonshot."
HP believes the Moonshot system 'redefines what's possible' in the new compute environment. Moonshot is described as a precision-engineered system designed to match the workload it's running - delivered in a compact, power- and energy-efficient package.
The system replaces general purpose servers with more energy-efficient SoCs (Systems-on-Chip) containing integrated accelerators tailored for specific workloads to provide optimal results. The Moonshot Chassis incorporates everything that is a common resource in a traditional server - power, cooling, management, fabric, switches, and network uplinks are all shared across 45 hot-pluggable server cartridges in a dense form factor.
McNiven explains that this allows the enterprise to optimise application performance.
"For example, in a general purpose server, the video and graphics demands of a number of simultaneous users could put pressure on overall compute performance. With Moonshot's dedicated graphics cartridges, each user gets the same experience as they would on their desktop."
With cartridges already architected for optimal Web hosting, Web caching on 64-bit ARM, hosted desktop infrastructure, video transcoding, application delivery, real-time data processing and telco development platform, HP Moonshot is set to rapidly add to its suite of specialised SoCs. "The road map for Moonshot is very exciting, " says McNiven. "A number of Silicon vendors are working with us to build a range of SoCs for highly specialised uses and niche industry verticals.
He explains that Moonshot is not intended to replace the general purpose server, but offers an opportunity to target and optimise specific applications and benefit from space savings of up to 85%, as well as a drop in power consumption of up to 95%.
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