Choppy waters for UK PLC? Revolutionary server can turn the tide

After a seemingly interminable era of growth and prosperity which saw terms like “boom and bust” consigned to the realms of historical curiosity, the global economic recession gave us all a rather nasty shock.

Six years later those UK companies which have survived are still feeling the effects, with CFOs forced to operate under intense pressure to grow their organisations. Today, the UK is cautiously creeping back to a respectable level of growth, but the days of predictable quarter-on-quarter prosperity are most certainly over. Companies must now seek – in everything they do – to minimise spend and show instant and appreciable ROI for every outlay.
The green agenda, though eminently welcome and worthy, has also ratcheted up the pressure on UK PLC. Increased awareness of the impact big business has on the world around it has nudged the carbon footprint of the enterprise into the purview of legislators. UK companies are now subject, for instance, to the 2008 climate change act, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 34 per cent by 2020, and from 1 October this year all quoted companies in this country will be required to report on their greenhouse gas emissions annually1.

Regulatory intervention is also driven by the spectre of energy shortages. Recently, Britain’s energy regulator Ofgem warned that Britain’s risk of suffering a major power blackout will rise significantly towards the middle of the decade as ageing generators bow out of service. The concerns are serious enough for the National Grid to call on companies to consider curbing their electricity use between 4pm and 8pm on winter workdays next year2.

We just don’t have the power, Captain!
One of the reasons for this is the proliferation of electronic devices in recent years. By 2020, we are expected to have 30 billion of these gadgets serving a planet of 8 billion people. The advent of cloud computing, big data and the consumerisation of technology offers companies a tremendous opportunity to engage with their customers anywhere and anytime with uniquely tailored services.

In addition, mobility and consumers’ ability to access the internet from the convenience of their pockets or handbags means that demand for web hosting – when companies lease server-space, internet connectivity and other web services from a supplier – has skyrocketed and will continue to rise.

Sadly though, the processing power at the back end has not yet evolved to handle this increase in demand. The reality is that taking advantage of these trends is not easily reconciled with spending less and consuming less. Up until now, the only way organisations could maintain high performance was to buy more traditional servers, more processing power, more data centre space and more energy – each one an expense to be analysed and justified to the board.

Asking for the moon?
So what to do?
Well, one rather smart and timely solution may have just presented itself. It is a new generation of server which uses 89 per cent less energy than its predecessors, is 97 per cent simpler, 77 per cent more affordable and requires 80 per cent less space. It is a genuine game-changer, and its name is HP Moonshot.

What is unique about this technology is that it is the world’s first “software-defined” server. In other words, the server is categorically designed and optimised for a specific software application and workload. HP Moonshot technology combines specificity with flexibility, allowing different, workload-specific server designs to be quickly incorporated without requiring a whole system reconfiguration.

This is ideal for services such as web hosting, which often require simple workloads to be hosted on enormous scales, because it enables the user to align the right amounts of compute, memory, storage and I/O (Input/Output) to a specific workload, thereby achieving unparalleled efficiencies. Imagine, for example, the servers hosting the Comic Relief website on Red Nose Day. The nature of the workload - processing donations – is not going to change but for 24 hours, the volume of transactions will go through the roof. The servers need to be able to accommodate that spike in demand.

An “inconvenient truth”
But it’s bigger than that.

Moonshot may be cheaper and simpler than any server ever conceived, and it may be able to squeeze the most power out of the least energy (which is great), but this capacity is not only a blessing for the enterprise, it is critical to sustaining our habits as a society. The fact is that the internet is already nearing breaking point. As a planet, we are performing more than 43,000 searches per second, sending 16 million tweets and hour and transacting $900 million worth of online business every single minute. And these figures are doubling in size every 36 months3.

Does the word “unsustainable” leap to mind? Because it should. And for traditional servers to handle this demand, the UK (for one) would have to become a considerably less “green and pleasant land”.

What we have today is basically a “New Style of IT” – one underpinned by the power of the cloud, populated by big data and made universally accessible by the propagation of cheap consumer devices. And a New Style of IT requires a new breed of server.

Moonshot uses almost 90 per cent less energy than traditional servers. This means thousands of metric tons of carbon dioxide which will never be released into the air; it means millions of square feet of forest which won’t have to been cleared to make way for data centre space, and it means dozens of power plants which will never have to be built.

It has been a choppy sailing for UK PLC in recent years, but this new breed of server could really turn the tide.

1 According to the Companies Act 2006 (Strategic Report and Directors’ Report) Regulations 2013

2 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/484f6730-df3f-11e2-a9f4-00144feab7de.html#axzz2XoZRH488

3http://h17007.www1.hp.com/uk/en/enterprise/servers/products/moonshot/index.aspx#moonshotOverviewVideo