[Info-vax] Don't worry, HP's project Moonshot will save us

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-04-08 23:19:21 +0000, Neil Rieck said:

> Don't worry, HP's project Moonshot will save us
> 
> http://www.zdnet.com/hp-launches-project-moonshot-powered-with-intels-atom-at-first-7000013686/ 
> 

Moonshot is clearly not aimed at the same market and the same style of 
computing that is performed with the typical OpenVMS server.

HP's <http://www.hp.com/go/moonshot> has some more details.

For some tasks, those boxes should work very nicely.   Many web 
services tasks should do nicely with that.  Also for dedicated hosting 
providers and for folks offering VPS computing, for instance.

List price of US$1260 per board/blade, plus the cost of the chassis box 
and I/O and storage giblets.  Not cheap, but certainly dense.   The 
question is whether it's cheaper (in terms of power or density or ease 
of management or... whatever) than available and competitive ODM 
hardware configurations that various organizations are now using.

Facebook has made available designs <http://www.opencompute.org> 
including Open Compute and Open Rack, based on what they're using in 
their data centers, for instance.

Strictly on core count, the Moonshot configuration would have once 
involved a whole rack of AlphaServer DS10L boxes.  It'd be interesting 
to see some comparisons of a 466 MHz or 600 MHz EV6 against a dual-core 
2 GHz Atom, too.  At least in terms of simplicity of installation and 
density, Moonshot easily wins.

The issue with software-defined computing — or utility computing or 
whatever it's called these days — tends to be with the system and 
management and application software, and the associated documentation.  
Great in theory, certainly.  If that whole stack all works and meets 
your needs, then you're good to go.  If not, then you just bought a 
gazillion idle cores, and with the requisite integration and deployment 
and management headaches.  (Not that you woudn't have had these 
headaches at this scale already.  One common bit of "fun" for any of 
these projects includes integrating third-party hardware and software 
into whatever you're using.)

Odd that the HP site shows "Sorry, there are no documents available for 
this product" in the referenced Moonshot library.  Ah, well.

Interesting.  But I'll reserve judgement, for now...



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