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Hewlett-Packard has launched its own variant on the "cookie sheet" minimalist server design championed by Google and imitated by commercial server makers.

Taking out weight and cost in servers among hyperscale data center operators is as important as power conservation and performance, which is one of the things that makes these upper-crust customers different from even large commercial server buyers, and worlds away from small and medium businesses. But hyperscale shops buy tens or hundreds of thousands of servers a year, which is the main reason why HP is getting in on the act.

Back in October 2008 when it was just Rackable Systems, the new (and presumably improved) Silicon Graphics created its own cookie sheet designs, called the CloudRacks, which slid trays of servers and storage into 22U or 44U racks instead of sliding them into 2U or 4U chasses that in turn mounted into racks. Why HP didn't cut even more metal out of the design and think at the rack level is unclear, but it looks like it wanted to create a cookie sheet design that used standard racks (either made by HP or by others) instead of forcing buyers to get its own racks.

What is clear is that the SL6000 machines are more squarely aimed at HP's need to sell more boxes into hyperscale accounts. According to John Gromala, director of marketing for the company's Industry Standard Servers division (that's the one that sells ProLiant rack and tower and BladeSystem blade servers) within its Enterprise Storage and Servers group, says that compared to traditional rack servers, the SL6000 setups use shared and tuned power supplies and cooling fans for specific server node configurations, allowing for up to 28 per cent less power consumption per node compared to regular HP ProLiant rack servers. And by carving out about 31 per cent of the weight, hyperscale data centers will pay less to ship the servers they buy to their facilities and will be able to pack the machines in tighter.

Not only are data centers that were designed in decades gone by not usually able to handle the kinds of power densities that modern data centers can do, they also can't handle the extra heavy weight. And, significantly, the SL6000s will cost about 10 per cent less than equivalent ProLiant server nodes, and that is before the volume discounts kick in.

The ProLiant SL6000 line consists of the z6000 chassis, which is a 2U box that the SL series server nodes (they are not blades in as much as they do not share a common midplane for systems management or share peripherals) slide into. Hyperscale customers are big on having server nodes and all their I/O accessible from the front, usually so they can put racks back to back and thereby make the most of the square footage of their data centers (otherwise, they have to leave room to service the racks from the back). Most commercial servers have hot plug disks in the front, which helps, but the internals of the machine are definitely not easily accessible and all of the networking is in the back.

The three SL series server nodes that slide into the z6000 chassis fix that. All of these server nodes are based on the Xeon 5500 processors, just like the DL1000 dense machines, but all of the cabling for the server nodes comes out of the front of the box. Disk drives are mounted on the servers and do not come in hot plug slots because, as Gromala explains it, hyperscale customers run distributed workloads and tend to replace an entire server node all at once, including processors, memory, and storage.

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