Up until now, the x86 server has been a kind of generic box, perhaps arranged or rearranged to provide the most raw power or the most energy savings, upon which you installed a virtualization layer to start making that power available to the operating system or to the orchestrator.

Until now. Virtualization led to the opposite trend in the data center, from the one that everyone predicted: With big data applications consolidating, content management applications consolidating, contact centers consolidating, unified communications consolidating, business management systems consolidating… on-premise servers started taking on more unique characteristics, not fewer. X86 boxes in different departments became less heterogeneous, not more, as the people in charge of them gained greater capability to shape them into the systems they really needed.

It’s dedicated cloud service providers who truly require just “bare metal,” and even their specifications are now being set in stone.

No more bare metal
The first absolute validation of this counter-intuitive trend came Thursday from HP, in the official announcement of its Gen9 editions of its venerable ProLiant server series. With availability beginning Sept. 8, HP is characterizing Gen9s — incorporating 1U and 2U racks, blade servers, towers, and its rack-scale architecture Apollo series — as being adaptable for workload optimization.

“The traditional mindset of servers, and the compute [capability] from servers, has to be changed,” says Vineeth Ram, HP’s vice president of product marketing for servers, in an interview with DatacenterDynamics. “A lot of the significant mega-trend that we have out there around cloud, mobility, social media, and big data… the ability of the existing infrastructure to scale at that level of economics, to be agile and flexible, to support all those public interactions, and really manage all that data, is really extremely difficult. It will not happen with the traditional model.”

The value-add for ProLiant Gen9 in all form factors will be the inclusion of a new iteration of the HP OneView management system that customers will use to provision their servers for particular classes of workloads. This will be an embedded management system that involves the UEFI bootstrap hardware; at the lowest level of the system, Gen9 will be geared toward workload management at a granular level, as Ram describes it.

That system will then let the IT department set up a services catalog, exposing the roles that workloads perform to users and letting them provision those services directly, cloud-style. Service-level agreements and auditable cost tracks will be applied to these services, as opposed to per-application SLAs that were only measurable on a per-vendor (e.g., SAP, Microsoft) basis rather than per-workload class.

“We take the traditional compute [model] that we had, and move it along three dimensions,” explains Ram: “being much more software-defined and cloud-ready; much more converged, as opposed to being silos; and better workload-optimized. When we start with these things, we can start moving to make IT more services-oriented, which means we can now start talking about how we help to reduce the costs of service — not the system, not the device, but the service — the time to deliver that service, and the business value and outcome from that service.”

“That’s the fundamental transformation that we have to drive, because the traditional approach will never let us get there,” Ram continues. “You’ll run out of data center capacity to support that level of growth. We’ll never have the level of economics we need; and we’ll never have the level of performance we need to support the next-generation demands of this new style of IT.”

Are there any specific examples of workloads that can be optimized for ProLiant Gen9? Ram specifically pointed to data warehousing and big data-oriented business analytics. “If you look at our initial offerings, from our rack portfolio to our blade portfolio, they are actually tuned for these applications,” he told us.

The first eight Gen9 buildouts
What we won’t know until September 8, when the Gen9 models first go on sale, is the exact buildout of HP’s eight new form factors. Why we won’t know this is pretty obvious: Intel has a major developer event on September 9, and probably some big announcements to make before that time. Based on the many hints HP has given us, we can expect to see a new round of Intel processors that is more geared toward specialization and HP’s goal of workload optimization. Putting HP’s management tools in the UEFI is a clear indication that these optimizations will take place at the lowest level of the server; any tweaking that needs to be done to the CPU will happen there.

What we do know today is that HP will initially be releasing Gen9 in these models and form factors:
- The ProLiant DL160 is a 1U model replacing the current DL160 Gen8, which runs on one- or two-way Intel Xeon E5-2600 series.

- A new ProLiant DL180 will be added to the product line, bringing back a 2U SKU that hasn’t been used since the G6 generation.

- The ProLiant DL360 appears to replace the current 1U class-2 socket DL360p Gen8, which uses one- or two-way Xeon E5-2600 v2 series.

- The ProLiant DL380 should replace the current DL380p Gen8 in the 2U form factor.

- The ProLiant ML350 is a tower or 5U rack convertible model also based on Xeon E5-2600 v2 series.

- The ProLiant BL460 replaces the current BL460c Gen8, which is an 8- or 16-blade enclosure based on Xeon E5-2600 v2 series.

- In the Apollo class, the ProLiant XL230a appears to replace the current XL220a Gen8 v2. That’s a model in HP’s exclusive “Apollo 6000” form factor, which is its smaller of the two rack-scale architectures.

- The ProLiant XL730f follows HP’s “Apollo 8000” form factor, which uses a combination of dry-disconnect and water cooling. That particular model was already announced, and is said to support two Xeon E5-2600 series CPUs per server.

HP has officially announced that Gen9 will work with DDR4 memory modules, which are not only significantly faster than DDR3 but are not nearly as constrained. It’s an absolute fact that Intel’s current Xeon v2 classes of CPU will not work with DDR4, so there’s an obvious conclusion you can draw.

“The Gen9 portfolio is designed to work with the [Intel] ‘Haswell’ processor,” concedes HP’s Vineeth Ram, declining to go into further specifics for now.

“Having said that, all of these key services are unique HP innovations over and on top of Intel technology — smart memory, smart cache, PCIe acceleration — these are all innovations on top of that. Intel is a portion of it, but a lot of this innovation is really more on top of it.”

The CPU capability that makes this fine-tuning possible is something we’ll likely learn more about from Intel in the next few weeks.