HP’s modular server portfolio is extremely broad and addresses multiple use cases and requirements within the market. The company’s BladeSystem c-Class product line is most proven. In addition, HP leads the blade server market in most countries; however, this lead has seen steady erosion since reaching its peak in 2011 as new products from vendors like Cisco and IBM have challenged HP’s technology argument. HP’s new Superdome X platform (evolved from the blade-based Integrity servers based on Itanium) is a high-end x86 system. HP positions this system for all x86 workloads demanding eight or more processors.

Because Superdome X provides processor and memory aggregation across blades, users can configure large system footprints of up to 16 processors and 12TB of memory. HP has also created a fault-tolerant version aimed at the NonStop installed base. HP also offers a wide variety of modular server products for scale-out workloads, including the Apollo platform (targeted at HPC and other compute-/graphics-intensive workloads), Moonshot (a system that blurs the boundaries between blade and multinode servers that is targeted at virtual desktop infrastructure [VDI], Web serving and workloads requiring extremely low-energy servers) and ProLiant SL (a highly proven multinode server that is suited to multiple workloads). The breadth of HP’s portfolio can be both a strength and a weakness; the company has a solution for almost any workload need, but users have to select the ideal system from a sometimes bewildering array of choices.

Strengths

• HP is a highly proven blade server vendor, with market leadership in most countries.
• HP has a strong multinode server portfolio, which addresses node-based workloads that benefit from maximum scale-out, and good market knowledge within the company’s Hyperscale group.
• HP’s high-end Superdome X and NonStop systems are well-suited to challenging, mission-critical x86 workloads, including SAP Hana and Unix consolidations.

Læs HP’s svar på rapporten her.

Jakob Toustrup