Hewlett Packard Enterprise last summer introduced the first of its Gen12 ProLiant systems, packed with Nvidia’s latest GPU accelerators and aimed squarely at the rapidly expanding AI space that in less than two years went from prompt-and-respond chatbots to AI agents that can reason, plan, and collaborate on their own.
Now come the rest of the Gen12 server family, powered by Intel’s “Granite Rapids” Xeon 6 processors and built to address a broader range of uses cases enterprises are dealing with. AI is certainly one of them, but organizations also are seeing more data storage and processing pushing out to the edge, which is becoming a central focus of enterprise compute and a challenge in areas from visibility to security to efficiency.
“The edge is growing, so the problem is growing,” Krista Satterthwaite, senior vice president and general manager of compute at HPE, told journalists during a press briefing. “The datacenter is controlled, it’s cradled, it’s constantly watched over all the time, but the edge is a little bit more of the Wild West. When you’re managing servers, it’s all about what you can see and when you can see it. You need to manage the lifecycle with firmware updates and security patches, and that can be a challenge. The challenge there at the edge is also really, really large because, again, a lot of customers don’t have experts at the edge to do those updates. It’s harder at the edge.”
Modern use cases like the edge – IDC expects global spending on edge computing to grow from $232 billion last year to almost $350 billion in 2027 – and AI are central to what the latest ProLiants are trying to address, Satterthwaite said.
“These challenges are really PhD-level compared with what they’ve had to deal with in the past,” she said. “Things like AI, they’re wildly excited about, but it’s pretty daunting to be able to handle new use cases from a power and cooling perspective but also from a capabilities perspective.”
HPE this week unveiled eight Xeon 6-powered Gen12 systems, with six of them being available this quarter and the other two scheduled for release in the summer. They come in various shapes and sizes, from 1U to 4U rack ProLiant servers as well as a dual-processor ProLiant tower (ML350) and a blade system (Synergy 480).
They not only include features that modern systems need but also reflect the trend toward smaller – and more space- and power-efficient – systems, according to John Carter, vice president of mainstream computing at HPE.
“For years we’ve seen the trend generally going from eight-socket to four-socket to two-socket now to one-socket,” Carter said. “The expectation is that continues to grow. The benefits of one-socket [is] the power savings while you still get the core density from Intel’s latest processor set, adding those more cores to be able to do more with fewer processors. The expectation is that we continue to see a shift there. I don’t think it’s going to [change] overnight – completely 180 – but that’s been going on for quite some time.”
Carter also pointed to the DL340, a 2U, single-socket system that he said “is specifically designed to give a little bit more expansion opportunity against a single-socket processor. It is 2U, like our DL380, but has one single processor in it. That’s going to give you expansion capabilities for adding cards and additional storage.”
That storage will include traditional options like SAS, SATA, and NVM-Express, he said. However, HPE will be “shifting heavily” towards Enterprise and Data Center Standard Form Factor (EDSFF), a clever and emerging storage form factor promoted by not only HPE but also the likes of Intel, Dell, Samsung, Microsoft, and Lenovo and offering improved density and thermal management, more flexibility to fit in varying chassis configurations, and hot-swappable drives.
EDSFF provides “more density and performance, especially at the PCIe 5-type performance level,” Carter said. “You are also going to see us focusing on continued availability for both standard stand-up cards as well as OCP form factor cards. We really tried to give a mix of all of the different form factors that you could want out there.”
In the latest ProLiants, HPE made security a priority. Within its Integrated Lights Out (iLO) service processor, the company is including a dedicated security processor dubbed “secure enclave,” which Satterthwaite said offers tamper-resistant protection for keys, passwords, and security configurations and is particularly needed in edge environments. In addition, iLO 7 now makes the systems resistant to encryption and other security threats that may arise when quantum computing arrives.
The vendor also enhanced the security features in its cloud-based Compute Ops Management platform, allowing enterprises “to set and customize security compliance baselines with the latest advisories to proactively manage firmware and reduce vulnerabilities,” she said, noting that HPE a few years ago introduced security automation to the tool.
“We are not just talking about seeing it as it happens or right before it happens,” Satterthwaite said. “What we are talking about is being able to plan and predict. We have historical data that’s analyzed for predictions for server utilization, helping customers achieve energy and emission goals. And there’s a sustainability report that allows customers to instantly see carbon footprint metrics, energy consumption, and estimated energy costs for individual servers or for the full server environment.”
In addition, HPE is adding AI-based insights to its predictive automation capabilities that will let organizations forecast the power their systems will use and set thresholds to control costs and carbon emissions. A global map view lets enterprises evaluate the health of their systems across increasingly distributed environments, which along with integrating toolsets from other vendors will reduce downtime by as much as 4.8 hours per server every year, according to Satterthwaite.
There also is automated onboarding capabilities to ease setting up and managing servers, particularly at edge environments like remote and branch offices. Many of these new management features will be available in Gen10 and newer servers.
HPE is expanding direct liquid cooling to its one-socket and two-socket Gen12 ProLiant rack systems. Carter noted that HPE’s liquid cooling technology typically goes into cold plates around processors, GPU expansion cards, and similar components, but doesn’t extend to storage in the latest configurations.
In pushing for enterprises to adopt the latest systems, Satterthwaite drew upon an argument similar to what PC makers make when they roll out new offerings, that modern infrastructures free up more capacity for the next-generation workloads, including AI.
When compared with Gen8 systems, the latest systems deliver a 26:1 server consolidation ratio and reduce power costs by 84 percent. Looking at the Gen10 Plus machines, the consolidation ratio is 6:1 and power savings are 50 percent.
She said HPE used Gen8 and Gen9 in the comparison because there are still a lot of enterprises using the systems, which the vendor can track via server support contracts.
“Older servers take up space, power, and time and they don’t deliver the performance they should for the space and power and time that they’re using,” Satterthwaite said. “Older servers also lack the latest security features that hadn’t been invented [when they were built] and the latest management tools. That creates additional complexity.”