HP ProLiant SL454x – Built for Big Data
HP recently announced a new line of ProLiant servers – the HP ProLiant SL4540 and the HP ProLiant SL4545 – both targeted to meet the needs of big data in your business environment. Why another platform? Because the phenomenon of big data brings a new set of issues and problems that demand a purpose built system. Simply put, we felt that a better solution was needed for what is commonly used today and where big data applications are going.
The term “big data” is often used as a catchall reference to the explosion of data stored in data centers worldwide. Big data; however, is not one item or one type of item. Big data for one user may consist of petabytes of photos and videos – for another, it may be a Hadoop cluster – and for another, a large email store. As part of the design process, we realized that a solution for one may not fit another. When we looked at what was available on the market today, we understood that the building blocks did not scale to the needed size. They consisted of too many individual parts – parts that often didn’t share components or manageability methods, but were combined as solutions. This methodology may have worked for small deployments, but it will break down at the level that big data solutions scale. And we all know that administrators can’t afford to spend time, money, and effort on trying to piece together these loosely coupled products into a cohesive solution. Instead, a system for big data needs to be thought of in the context of thousands of individual nodes – all operating as one. They must be easy to manage, easy to service, and built for scale.
The HP ProLiant SL4540 and SL4545 provide exactly these features. These new servers combine storage and compute in a new dense package – gaining the advantages of power and physical space savings, while maintaining individual server node serviceability. This enables consistent building blocks that are able to be deployed, using the same server management tools used (and understood) by server administrators. They look and behave like other HP ProLiant servers because they ARE. There is no longer a need to understand which server is connected to which external storage device or a need to understand the operational rules between two devices. All servers and attached storage are managed the same way.
These new servers also take into account that no two big data applications have the exact same needs. Big data solutions need flexibility to adjust to the application needs. In particular, we realized that hard drive count to CPU core count was an important ratio. Today’s solutions attempt to meet these various ratio needs by combing products or often unique snowflake solutions, which often results in different server types and components within a big data deployment. But both the ProLiant SL4540 and SL4545 solve this issue by having multiple chassis options to tailor the amount of hard drive spindles to the CPU cores. All solutions use the same motherboards, NICs, and Smart Array controllers, enabling application tuning without having to re-qualify whole new solutions.
While power consumption is another concern in scale out solutions, power consumption isn’t always the major concern when designing traditional storage enclosures. They often don’t have the capabilities to fine tune the fan control algorithms to adjust for individual application variations. Yet big data solutions scale to many systems in size, compounding the problem seen on an individual unit level. The HP ProLiant SL4540 and SL4545 bring the power of Sea of Sensors and Smart Array technology to monitor every hard drive temperature for precise fan control, thereby not wasting power. This can amount to hundreds of watts saved compared to traditional systems and thousands of watts saved when looking across all of the systems together.
As big data applications change, the solution needs to be able to adapt as well. Included with every ProLiant SL4540 or ProLiant SL4545 is the power of Smart Array, which provides the ability to grow and change. And new features such as SmartCache provide the ability to scale performance and data manageability.
In the end, the new HP ProLiant SL4540 and HP ProLiant SL4545 servers provide new, simplified, yet powerful building blocks that are designed to address big data manageability, power efficiency, serviceability, and solution flexibility needs.