HP ProLiant DL980 Servers

HP’s summer lineup update this year has not passed powerful enterprise-wide servers. Why didn’t it pass by? The fact is that some particularly productive server models from HP are built with such a serious margin in power and memory density that the company updates them less often than other lines. Such servers, as a rule, take in all current processors and have a substantial margin for increasing productivity.

However, Moore’s law has not yet been repealed, time does not stand still, and those who sleep on their laurels run the risk of lagging behind the highly competitive market. HP, obviously, does not belong to those, and constantly monitors the situation. Perhaps this is partly why Intel, as if by order, released the eight-core server Xeons of the 6500 and 7500 series. Should they be installed somewhere?

Now they can be installed in the new ProLiant DL980, with up to eight pieces at a time. By simple multiplication we get 64 processor cores, and such a figure, you see, inspires respect, even by itself. To match the processors and memory. Supported by 16-gigabyte modules, which against the background of 128 slots for memory gives us a good two terabytes. The capacity is very impressive, but the tasks for the server should be serious: the DL980 is designed to work on a large enterprise scale, under a virtualized load, or as part of a single, but very intensive work with application data.

The performance growth in the DL980 is achieved not only “head-on”, by increasing the number of cores and gigabytes of memory, but also using proprietary HP technologies. Behind this rather banal phrase is the millions of human hours of the research unit - an HP-level company is simply obliged to have a serious development team, otherwise it just doesn’t. Producers of comparable scale are also not in vain eating their bread, and in the market of high-performance servers, performance optimization technologies and specialized operational technical support are increasingly coming to the fore. Technologically, the DL980 is fully consistent with a serious hardware.

The server implements several technologies at once, designed to increase processor performance (smart CPU caching), reduce the consequences of system failures (self-healing resiliency) and implement full-fledged remote control (iLO 3). If everything is clear with processor caching and remote control, a few words need to be said about self-healing resiliency. In short, the technology allows you to isolate areas of memory where a failure has occurred. Thus, you will only have to restart the directly affected application or virtual machine, while the rest will continue to work as if nothing had happened.

16 high-speed I / O slots are responsible for communications, where you can install any necessary interfaces for flexible integration of the server into your existing infrastructure. The server also did not remain without an “on-board” network controller - in all configurations there are four gigabit ports. For local data storage, you can use up to 8 SFF form factor disks (2.5 inches) with SAS interface.

In general, the server looks quite harmonious, especially given the timeliness of the appearance. Companies planning to upgrade or expand the technical fleet can now make DL980 plans for the fall. The presence of a large number of memory slots and processors leaves considerable scope for server performance growth over several years.

See also photo reviewHP Proliant DL980 by Brontozaurus .