HP ProLiant SL4545 HP Project Moonshot and the Redstone Development Server Pla - Page 9

software stack has a reputation for being a light computational workload, where fetching and delivering data is more important than computational power. The Redstone Development Server may not be as effective for more memory-intensive applications such as Hadoop and Memcached, because they might need more memory than the 32-bit Redstone processors can address. Follow-on Moonshot platforms may be better suited for such applications. Estimated power, space, and cost savings To illustrate the amount of savings Redstone can deliver, let's consider a scenario of a target workload requiring 400 x86 servers today. We estimate a total cost of ownership of $3.3 million, which includes the following: • Server acquisition costs (dual-socket 1U servers in 10U racks) amortized over 3 years • Networking acquisition costs (top of rack switches and cables) amortized over 3 years • 3-year power costs • 3-year cooling costs • Space costs amortized over 15 years To reach the same performance with the Redstone Development Server, we estimate needing about 1600 servers at a cost of $1.2 million. Figure 6 shows estimated savings when using the Redstone Development Server instead of traditional x86 servers. Figure 6: In hyperscale environments, use of the Redstone Development Server shows tremendous promise for savings. Traditional x86 $3.3M 400 servers 10 racks 20 switches 1,600 cables 91 kilowatts 89% less energy 94% less space 63% less cost 97% less complexity HP Redstone $1.2M 1,600 servers 1/2 rack 2 switches 41 cables 9.9 kilowatts These estimated savings apply to workloads for which you can use a 4:1 ratio of Redstone servers to traditional x86 servers to achieve equal throughput performance. For mainstream IT workloads with higher computational requirements, you are not likely to see the same cost and power savings. Traditional approaches might give better results for such workloads because you are likely to need more servers to meet the same performance. In some cases, you might choose to trade off cost and power for the space savings achieved in the Moonshot program. Application porting and re-compiling Many software applications are already available and supported on the ARM instruction set. Other serverspecific applications and system software must be recompiled and tuned for ARM. That's because the ARM instruction set is not binary compatible to x86, and because the performance tradeoffs are different. Efforts are already under way to expand the software available on ARM. In May 2012, Calxeda demonstrated a 9