By Dave Peterson, group manager, Industry Standard Servers Product Marketing
HP’s recently introduced ProLiant SL “skinless” server line snags top spot in performance per watt benchmark

Earlier this year at the 2009 World Championships Jamaican runner Usain Bolt sprinted into history as he became the first man ever to hold the 100m and 200m world and Olympic titles at the same time.  In the process he shattered a few world records, shaving 0.11 seconds off the record he had previously set in Beijing at the 2008 Olympics.  One thing I find interesting about this man who is clearly the fastest man in the world is that he says he doesn’t run to set world records.

Though I would not want to directly compare the almost superhuman feats of Usain Bolt to the work done by the HP ProLiant engineering teams, I believe there is a parallel here.  Earlier this year HP released our Extreme Scale-out (ExSO) x86 server line, dubbed “SL” for “scalable line” and often referred to as “skinless” for it’s stripped down, light-weight design.

One of the key design goals for ProLiant SL was to improve power efficiency as much as possible. When you have thousands of servers running scale-out workloads day in and day out, squeezing every cycle out of those servers for the lowest possible wattage is incredibly important from an OpEx (energy cost) perspective.  Thus HP’s engineers set about to improve performance per watt on this platform so our customers could have the most cost effective scale-out platform possible.  They didn’t set as their goal to create a new world record.  But by focusing on the challenge of saving our customers money on energy, these amazing HP engineers have also shattered a world record. 

The just-published SPECpower_ssj2008* benchmark result for HP ProLiant SL2x170z G6 is the best ever SPECpower_ssj2008 result of 2316 overall ssj_ops/watt*.  That is 3.81% better than the previous record held by IBM*. As a comparison, Usain Bolt’s 9.58 second 100m world record was 1.34% faster than his closest competitor, Tyson Gay, who clocked a 9.71.  If Bolt had run 3.81% faster than Tyson Gay in that particular race, his world record would have been 9.34 seconds, an unheard of time for 100 meters.

I’d love to hear your thoughts – what could you do with the money saved from improving your performance per watt by running HP ProLiant servers?

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SPEC® and the benchmark name SPECpower_ssj® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.  Benchmark results stated above reflect results published on www.spec.org as of 11/04/2009.  For the latest benchmark results, visi http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/