HP releases ProLiant Gen8 details

Last week there was a leak regarding HP ProLiant Gen8 servers, but today the entire cat is officially out of the bag. The cat really should be a tiger, the changes are so significant. G7 servers were fairly incremental improvements over G6, with only a few minor changes. Gen8 appears to me to be the biggest overhaul of the ProLiant server line in 10 years. They claim over 150 design innovations. Features include:

• Agentless server monitoring (finally!)
• Optimized for SSD storage (over 500K IOPS per server)
• Lower power usage ~10%
• 66% faster time to problem resolution
• Tool-less design for most parts
• Locking front covers (why did it take them so long to copy Dell?)
• HP Insight Online, which is a cloud based service for ProLiant monitoring 
• New drive carriers with big green status lights
• HP Smart SSD wear Gauge
• Boot to video in just three seconds (no more blank screen for minutes white booting!)
• Up to 50 percent more drives per server
• Up to 50 percent more memory capacity
• Reduced RAID re-build times (they cite 42 days to 5 hours for one client with a huge array)
• Real-time application tuning and performance reporting
• HP Active Health monitors 1,600 system parameters and 100 percent of configuration changes
• Export Active Health data in 3-4 minutes to submit to HP professional support services
• HP Intelligent provisioning takes strengths from HP SmartStart, Smart Update Manager and ProLiant Support packs and puts them on the system board. Firmware, drivers and tools are pre-loaded with no CDs needed.
• Smart Drive carrier proactively warns you if you try and pull the wrong drive from an array, resulting in data loss.
• HP Smart Socket guide, allows you to add processors without pending pins.
• HP SmartMemory that tracks errors, identify trends, and proactive resolves issues
• And a lot more!

Check out their well done web site complete with videos and PDFs here.