HP's ProLiant Expands to Eight-Sockets

HP has announced that it is re-entering the eight-socket industry-standard server market with the ProLiant DL785 G5. Three years ago, HP dropped its eight-socket ProLiant DL740 and DL760 servers, claiming that blades and four-socket servers could fill the void. Why the sudden reversal of strategy? It is primarily being driven by large SQL databases and the relentless drive to consolidate industry-standard servers. Another factor that is prompting customers to scale up is energy costs. A large, virtualized server has the potential to be much more energy efficient than a collection of smaller servers. It is obvious to us that this is the right time for HP to re-enter the eight-socket market it once led.

This time around, HP has some serious competition to contend with. Sun is betting on the Sun Fire X4600 that supports up to eight Opteron processors in a single 4U enclosure. Sun claims it will be upgrading this server to the quad-core "Barcelona" processor in the near future. IBM recently introduced the 4U System x 3950 M2 modular server that features four quad-core "Tigerton" Xeon processors in each module. Up to four modules can be interconnected using NUMA technology IBM acquired when it bought Sequent. Unisys has traditionally been one of the leaders in this market with the ES7000/one, and will need to upgrade its existing servers to four-core processors to remain competitive in this market.

Not only are there a number of these large industry-standard servers from which to choose, they are all remarkably different in architecture, size, and capabilities. Each company has taken a slightly different approach to the same set of problems. HP and Sun feel the NUMA-like Direct Connect and HyperTransport capability in Opteron gives that architecture an advantage over Intel’s current Xeon architecture. IBM and Unisys had to design their own chipsets, incorporating their own NUMA implementations, to scale their Intel servers beyond four-sockets. Of course Intel will soon include its own version of Direct Connect in Xeon, making that a moot point. Another area of differentiation is the level of expandability. Sun, with its eight sockets in a 4U enclosure, has the least expandability of the group. HP puts its eight sockets into a single 7U enclosure, along with a large number of memory DIMMs, I/O slots, and disk drives. IBM and Unisys designed multiple 4U modules that have limited expandability per box, but good expandability when multiple boxes are considered.

So whose strategy is best? We at IDEAS feel the decision ultimately comes down to the customer's existing space constraints, storage architecture, and the ability of the customer to accurately predict future capacity needs. If space is very tight, then the modular components that IBM and Unisys offer would provide the opportunity to start small and scale up as needed. Sun’s server with its eight-sockets in a single box would also be an excellent solution for this situation, although it would require a SAN or storage array. If customers can accurately predict that their application needs will eventually include eight quad-core processors, then the ProLiant DL785 G5 is the right choice. At 7U, it is 1U less than two of the modular servers from IBM and Unisys, plus it has great expandability. The DL785 G5 also does not require scalability cables to go from four to eight sockets. That reduces latency and adds to the overall reliability. Finally, HP’s choice of the Opteron architecture and its HyperTransport allows for seamless eight-socket connectivity compared to today’s Xeon. Overall, we feel the ProLiant DL785 G5 is an excellent choice for today’s industry-standard scale-up requirements.