HP Moonshot is literally a great shot aimed at the moon…
And we are saying this in a good way because there are only wonderful things that mankind will benefit from when (what if… IF HP scr*ws up again their other business, political management issues) its new class of ‘software-defined’ servers take off with shipments starting second half of this year.
Recently launched by CEO Meg Whitman, HP Moonshot is an ambitious effort to rejuvenate HP’s flagging server business with a brilliant injection of what is still widely agreed as ‘concept innovation’ into the tired and commoditised server.
In concept, Moonshot stands a pretty good chance because it brings together the lure of ‘economy’ and ‘green’ values, packaged together irresistibly for the increasingly social-conscious enterprise.
Today, there are about 10 billion devices that are connected to the Internet and these include mobiles phones and tablets, home gadgets, POS devices, auto sensors, smart surveillance, RFID tags, etc.
With this figure potentially touching over 20 billion devices in several years, HP is cleverly positioning its Moonshot as the server power forward for a world that will then be almost fully connected, and struggling to sustain very high energy cost demands imposed by traditional technologies.
“HP Moonshot marks the beginning of a new style of IT that will change the infrastructure economics and lay the foundation for the next 20 billion devices.”
~ Meg Whitman
For the uninitiated, HP Moonshot was already conceptually introduced last summer (mid 2012) as a new class of revolutionary, low-power servers that leverage the intelligence of software in applying three key rules to attain the required computing performance in an incredibly economic manner:-
a) Using default connectivity to leverage only the most efficient components and processors
b) Sharing infrastructure to eliminate energy sapping components
c) Right-sizing the exact power required for specific applications
HP touts a real-life example in its HP.com website powered by Moonshot servers that use energy equivalent to ONLY a dozen or so 60-watt light bulbs.
Targeting high-volume Internet data centres, the software-defined HP Moonshot servers are sold to be ‘ideal for hyperscale computing environments’. However critics say that it will take much more power-packed servers to run the heavier workloads of e-commerce sites.
“While it promises significantly reduced energy consumption (and space requirements), nobody in their right mind would imagine running a Hadoop programme on a cluster of Moonstones,” says a data centre systems engineer.
We might have to wait a while more, but the day might just come when the Moonshot is gunned down. If it hasn’t ‘shot itself in the foot’ already.
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IT BYTES BACK! says: Is HP Moonshot more than just a science project? We sincerely hope so because the world is in dire need of a truly Next-Gen class of servers to cope with all of its big data, mobile, social, cloud and collaboration hypes.
