The new range of HP DL380 Gen9 servers has been designed for the Cloud, Big Data and the new needs for mobility and social networks. This is the manufacturer’s positioning. The new Gen9 servers support 22 Intel Xeon v3 processor references, the support for DDR4 memory and an inferior power consumption.

A new storage system
All models in are standard fitted with a B140i controller capable of supporting up to 10 SATA drives in RAID 5. A clever mezzanine design adds a SmartArray P440ar controller bringing to 12 the number of 12Gbps SAS drives supported without sacrificing a PCI Express slot. Two additional 2.5-inch drives can be seated in the rear of the SSD models to speed dedicated I / O operations. The P440ar has 2 GB of memory dedicated faster flash for high speed I/O protected by a backup battery.

A redesigned network approach
Owners of the previous generation were limited by the standard FlexibleLOM equipment, compelling them to add an optional 4 Gigabit port board. Now, the 4 Gigabit ports are standard. HP has not so far questioned his FlexibleLOM approach however, it simply adds it to the standard interfaces. It is thus possible to add an additional 4 port gigabit Ethernet board, or even Fibre Channel or 10GbE.

A future-proof design
In addition to supporting Intel Xeon v3 processors, the 24 memory locations provide a 768GB with 32GB RAM sticks. Mid-2015, the limit is upped to 3TB (using 128TB RAM sticks), enabling the ProLiant DL380 to support intensive in-memory tasks. The administration interface is devoted to iLO4 v2.0 via a dedicated gigabit port, which allows monitoring via a web interface. A “Federation View” allows administering multiple servers from a single viewpoint to monitor their activity. Monitoring the storage and network activity is devoted to the SIM utility (Systems Insight Manager) and is completed by OpenView, which allows to limit the power consumption on a per-server basis. Perfect for a virtualized enterprise environment. In this respect, the energy consumption is central to the design of this server. At full load, the 2x800W the DL380 consume 352W (90W in normal mode) is significantly less than its competitor Dell PowerEdge T630 (390W and 120W respectively). A dedicated app, Insight Online, allows to check the health of the server remotely from a single tablet.

Conclusion
HP has carefully designed each hardware and software component of its new generation server to meet modern intensive workloads and enabling them as building blocks aimed towards datacenters with extensive versatility. Being more powerful, scalable, and less energetic, the Gen9 servers have the means of their ambition.