Hewlett-Packard has unveiled a new multi-year, multi-phased program called Project Moonshot that aims to dramatically reduce the footprint and energy consumption of the large server farms required for cloud  computing environments.
"For Web 2.0 companies to continually deliver new and innovative services, they must radically reduce the space, energy consumption and cost of their data center infrastructure ," said Glenn Keels, product marketing director at HP's Hyperscale Business Group.
In January, HP will open its first HP Discovery Lab in Houston, where clients will be able to experiment, test and benchmark applications on Redstone -- a server development platform that represents Project Moonshot's initial proof-of-concept offering. Additional lab sites are planned in Europe and Asia, where clients will be able to work directly with HP engineers and industry peers to test the new technology's ability to fulfill their specific requirements.
HP's ultra energy-efficient Redstone platform will integrate over 2,800 servers in a single rack that delivers a 97 percent reduction in complexity through reductions cabling, switching and the need for peripheral devices.
"Companies with hyper-scale environments are facing a crisis in capacity that requires a fundamental change at the architectural level," said HP Vice President Paul Santeler.
New Era of Energy Efficiency
The Redstone platform will incorporate energy-efficient processors from start-up Calxeda. Based on ARM's Cortex cores, Calxeda's EnergyCore server-on-a-chip is designed to consume as little as 1.5 watts of power. According to Calxeda CEO Barry Evans, the EnergyCore chip is designed to handle workloads such as Web serving, media streaming and scalable analytics, as well as mid-tier infrastructure tasks pertaining to caching and in-memory scalable databases.
"We believe a new era of energy-efficient servers is now dawning for scale-out workloads," Evans said.
Among other things, EnergyCore incorporates an 80-Gigabit fabric switch together with an integrated management engine with power optimization software . The single piece of silicon also sports a full complement of server I/O features and a large 4MB ECC L2 cache.
The goal is to enable system vendors to offer a complete server node with 4GB of ECC memory and a large-capacity, solid state drive that only consumes five watts of power. (continued...)
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