HP sends out invites for an 8 April 2013 webcast event-- the unveiling of the hyperscale server part of Project Moonshot, the HP take on densely packed low-power servers.
The launch follows 18 months of development since the November 2011 announcement of Project Moonshot. It was first revealed as "Redstone," an ARM-based design packing either 288 EnergyCards (a Calxeda reference design packing x4 EnergyCore SoCs, x4 DIMM slots and x4 SATA slots on a single daughterboard) on a 4U rack-mount server or 2800 on a full rack, together with shared power, cooling and management infrastructure.
In 2012 HP changed direction with Gemini, an architecture-agnostic server design supporting both x86 Intel Atom and ARM processors. The server to be revealed on the 8 April event will probably carry the Atom S1200 chip, as repurposed with 64-bit server support, but customers wanting to use ARM chips can work with HP to recompile application code.
According to HP Project Moonshot servers promise plenty of savings-- consuming up to 89% less energy, 94% less space and 63% less costs than traditional x86 server environments. Servers of the low-power variety are not ideal for traditional enterprise applications, instead being designed for private cloud implementations, data centres and specific-use cases.
Moonshot products will make part of the current HP server lineup, together with ProLiant Gen8 tower, rack and blade servers and the mission-critical NonStop line.
