HP announced a new line of ProLiant servers which it said would rid users of the need to perform about half of the typical hands-on management tasks. This enables operational cost savings and reduces the likelihood of downtime, the company said Monday.

Manual operations like server administration, application deployment and power and cooling management are a major cost in any data center. HP says these costs can run as high as US$45m a year for an average 10,000 sq ft data center, and its generation-eight ProLiant machines are a way to cut a lot of that cost out.

Dave Donatelli, executive VP and general manager of HP’s Enterprise Servers, Storage, Networking and Technology Services group, said data center operations costs was skyrocketing to the point of unsustainability.

“Today, we are responding with innovative intelligence technologies that empower server that virtually take care of themselves, allowing administrators to devote more time to business innovation,” he said.

The first models of the series to go into general availability will be ML tower for remote branch offices, DL rack-mount servers and BL blade servers.

The Gen8 ProLiant machines tackle both operational and capital costs from a variety of angles, however. The new line of servers optimizes the use of power, cooling and space in the data center through a number of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) features.

Tools are available for asset tracking, and power and thermal monitoring.

The announcement is another step in what HP calls its multi-year plan to transform the server market. This is the plan’s third phase called Project Voyager.

The $300m R&D initiative follows Project Odyssey, a roadmap to unify Unix and x86 serer architectures. Odyssey was the second phase of the plan that kicked off with Project Moonshot, a multi-year program to develop “extreme low-energy” servers.

Gen8 ProLiant servers are available to early adopters today, slated go into general availability in March.