By John Gromala, director, product marketing, Industry Standard Servers, HP

Today, HP introduced our first addition to the HP ProLiant line since the 2001 introduction of blade servers with the new extreme scale ProLiant SL-family.
 
This addition marks a very important inflection point in the industry as more companies adopt very large scale data centers to support their businesses. We're talking about datacenters with thousands --to tens of thousands of nodes here --a segment of data center customer we're calling Extreme Scale-out (ExSO). These customers are the Web giants (search, Web 2.0, etc.) or more traditional businesses in the high-performance computing and enterprise realm.  For both, IT is a key enabler of their business and is directly linked to the product or service they deliver to customers (whether it be delivering online applications or digital crash simulations).

Traditionally, these customers have been limited to one-off custom designs or proprietary offerings to meet their needs. Metrics like performance per watt per square foot are the name of the game for these guys. Every dollar spent for power, operations or server acquisition impacts business profitability.

Enter the new HP ProLiant SL6000 Scalable System, which uses a "skinless" systems architecture that replaces the traditional chassis with an extremely lightweight rail and tray design – all based on industry standards.

SL customers use 2U a z6000 chassis that leverages shared power and fans to maximize energy efficiencies and can mix-and-match between 3 new SL servers optimized for very specific ExSO workloads:

1. ·   HP ProLiant SL2x170z G6 delivers high-density compute with two servers in each 1U tray for highly dense applications such as high-performance computing and web front-end applications.

2. ·   HP ProLiant SL160z G6 delivers increased memory with 18 dual, in-line memory module (DIMM) slots and up to two peripheral component interconnect (PCI) slots, making it ideal for large memory-cache apps.

3. ·   HP ProLiant SL170z G6 delivers the greatest storage capacity with up to six large form-factor Serial ATA (SATA) or serial-attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives. The server is ideal for large storage applications such as web search and database applications.

These new ProLiant SL servers join HP’s existing ProLiant DL (rack), ML (tower) and BL (blade) servers. Learn more about ProLiant Servers here.

Jump right to information on the HP’s new Extreme Scale-out (ExSO) portfolio here.

Read more about HP's ExSO portfolio in today's press release here.