HP Broadens Moonshot Portfolio to New Applications for Increased Efficiency and Lower Cost

Optimizing application delivery, video transcoding, web infrastructure and web hosting with expanded ecosystem of partners

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 23, 2014 — HP today announced new HP ProLiant Moonshot solutions, further expanding the portfolio of customized end-to-end compute solutions designed to enable business innovation while lowering datacenter costs. The announcement includes new HP Moonshot solutions for:

• Application delivery with Citrix XenApp
• Video transcoding with Harmonic Inc. and Vantrix
• Web infrastructure in-a-box
• Managed web hosting

“A transformative approach to computing is required to enable breakthrough capabilities not possible using traditional servers and move the needle on workload optimization,” said Paul Santeler, vice president and general manager, Moonshot, HP. “The unique architecture of HP Moonshot delivers extreme density and power efficiency. Customers can expand their offerings and prepare for the future, while significantly reducing the complexity of their infrastructure.”

HP Moonshot is capturing the attention of innovative global companies like 20th Century Fox, which is using the system to migrate web workloads from the public cloud and for transferring large digital movie and television files, trailers and digital marketing content.

“For a global media company, innovation is key and HP Moonshot has been a great tool in our arsenal,” said John Herbert, chief information officer and executive vice president, 20th Century Fox. “With HP, we’ve been able to repatriate digital marketing websites from the public cloud, as well as expedite our extreme file transfer capabilities, all at unparalleled economics while at the same time being kind to the planet.”

Enhancing application delivery

In combination with Citrix XenApp, HP is introducing a new HP Moonshot solution for application delivery. The solution enables organizations to:

• Increase productivity from any place, at any time, by simplifying the delivery of business applications to employees, regardless of their device.
• Reduce the cost and complexity of managing applications in the data center by consolidating application delivery into a single architecture.
• Achieve lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with fewer components to manage, less floor space, and reduced power consumption.

The HP Moonshot solution for application delivery is based on the new HP Moonshot ProLiant m710 server, which features the customized Intel® Xeon® E3-1284L v3 processor with built-in Intel® Iris Pro Graphics P5200. With the integrated Graphics Processor Unit (GPU), HP Moonshot eliminates the need for discrete graphics processor cards and allows customers to host any application in the datacenter and deliver it as a service to end users, from Microsoft Office applications to sophisticated multi-media healthcare applications.

“Trends like mobility and graphic-intensive media use are challenging IT organizations to balance performance demands from users with the costs of increasing their compute infrastructure,” said Rakesh Narasimhan, Group Vice President and General Manager, Desktop and App Virtualization, Citrix. “HP Moonshot strikes that balance, combining new power, management and networking efficiencies while providing a powerful Citrix XenApp application experience. It’s a tremendous value for businesses deploying mobile workspaces.”

Transforming video transcoding

Broadcasting companies and multi-service operators (MSOs) face a tremendous challenge to provide an ever-increasing volume of content to a rapidly growing number of devices, all requiring different formats and resolutions. This combined with the adoption of ultra-high definition (4K) resolution format places a massive strain on existing transcoding infrastructures.

HP offers cost-effective video transcoding on the HP Moonshot m710 enabled by both Vantrix Media Platform and Harmonic VOS architecture. Broadcasting companies and MSOs can now support 20 times more transcoded video streams per rack using HP Moonshot servers, versus the industry average, with up to 80 percent reduction in costs per stream and a 95 percent reduction in floor space.⁽¹⁾

Multiple web-tiers, one integrated web solution

HP is also introducing a new end-to-end solution for web infrastructure in-a-box based on the HP Moonshot ProLiant m300 server. Companies can now easily stand up and manage their entire multi-tier web infrastructure within one HP Moonshot chassis or across multiple chassis for maximum scalability and high-availability.

The web infrastructure in-a-box features a LAMP stack solution that includes an exclusive Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription model for HP Moonshot servers using Intel® Atom™ processors to lower the total cost of ownership for an end-to-end Web solution.

Additionally, the web infrastructure in-a-box leverages solutions from Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu.  Canonicals’ Juju, Charms and MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service) automate the provisioning of applications for scale out and cloud. Juju and Charms simplify the deployment of scale out workloads, including load-balancing, web serving and databases across dedicated groups of servers within the HP Moonshot chassis. The result is a dense computing solution designed to scale easily to deploy complex workloads quickly.

“As a leading technology company in India, Sify is continually looking for ways to improve efficiency and enhance service for our customers. Our most public face to customers is through health.sify.com, and we found the HP Moonshot solution for web infrastructure in-a-box to be an ideal fit for serving up our website,” said Ravi Shelvankar, CEO Sify, North America. “Since moving key portions of health.sify.com to HP Moonshot, we have achieved 60 percent space savings and 40 percent power savings, reducing costs and freeing up valuable space in our data center.”

Highly dense managed hosting

HP also is engaging hosted service providers with a new, highly-dense HP Moonshot ProLiant m350 server featuring Intel® Atom™ C2730 processors. With 180 servers per 4.3U and eight cores per server, it is the densest CPU core count available in a HP Moonshot System for managed hosting.

“Powered by Intel’s 2nd generation 64-bit Intel® Atom® processor based SoCs, the HP ProLiant m350 underscores Intel’s 64-bit SoC market and technology leadership by delivering the highest density available in the Moonshot server family,” said Raejeanne Skillern, general manager, Cloud Service Providers Business, Intel. “Combined with the new HP ProLiant m710 server featuring the Intel® Xeon® E3-1284L v3 processor with built-in Intel® Iris Pro Graphics P5200, customers can choose from server options that have been customized to deliver unmatched performance density for workloads ranging from static web hosting and video transcoding to virtual application delivery.”

Pricing and availability

The new HP Moonshot servers and related solutions are available now worldwide from HP and HP enterprise-authorized channel partners. Flexible investment solutions for HP Moonshot servers can provide customers and channel partners with quick access to the latest HP products through a simple, scalable and predictable monthly payment that aligns technology and financial requirements to business needs.⁽²⁾ Pricing will vary based on model and customer configurations.

Additional information is available at www.hp.com/go/Moonshotpresskit.