HP’s Server Strategy Focuses on SSDs, Storage Bottleneck

Computerworld: HP has announced the next generation of its ProLiant servers, which the company claims can boost performance by 50 percent for online transaction processing (OLTP), streaming video and other popular applications. The new servers will feature solid-state drives (SSDs) which use its Dynamic Workload Acceleration data caching algorithm for better performance. In addition, they will have twice as much DRAM cache and 50 percent more hard drives, supporting up to 36TB of capacity in a single 2U (3.5-in high) DL380. It also boasts an improved RAID controller and PCIe Gen 3 support.

Gartner’s Valdis Filks noted, “Storage really is one of the biggest bottlenecks. The server has increased in speed 10 times and disk storage has probably not doubled in the last five years as far as response times.” The new ProLiant models are designed to address that bottleneck.