H-P Unveils 'Skinless' Servers

Hewlett-Packard(HPQ Quote) ramped up its data center strategy with the launch of new servers, software and services Wednesday.

The hardware giant took the wraps off its Extreme Scale-Out (ExSO) family of products, which are aimed at the Web 2.0, cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) markets.

As organizations in these sectors wrestle with rapidly growing data centers, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based firm claims to have devised a clever way to keep users' costs down.

"The scale of what they are dealing with is very different," says John Gromala, director of product marketing for H-P's industry standard server group. "Let's take [the example of] an online gaming company -- if their business really takes off, they have to scale from 100,000 to 500,000 servers overnight or they lose their competitive edge."

In an attempt to tackle this situation, H-P unveiled three new ProLiant servers, which it is touting as lighter and less power-hungry than typical rack-mounted servers. Dubbed the "SL" family, the 1.75-inch high devices look more like computer motherboards than traditional servers, which are usually enclosed in a metal casing.

The SL160z G6 is aimed at applications that require large memory and the SL170z G6 is targeted at organizations with heavy storage and compute requirements. A third offering, the snappily-titled SL2x170z G6, contains two servers within the same footprint as one of the other devices, and is aimed at the HPC market.

Any two of these machines fit into a ProLiant z6000 chassis, and up to 21 z6000s can then be placed within a standard data center rack.