HP Moonshot - low power, nothing else

Here’s the pitch:

It’s a vertical-mounted blade chassis that’s loaded with low-end blades.

• 45 blades per enclosure

• 1 CPU (Atom - these are awful) and 8GB of RAM (single stick) per blade

• 1 hard drive per blade – SATA or SSD

• 2x 1Gb ports per blade

• 4.3U per enclosure

• 45 blades per 4.3U or 10.5 blades per U, which means ~11 proc and 88 GB of RAM per U

• Low density compared to a c3000/7000 or DL360s

• 10Gb uplinks from enclosure

• Only requires 2x 1200W (redundant) PSUs, which is less than the 4-6x 1200W PSUs that are commonly needed for a c3000 chassis with 8 blades.

• Moonshot is a POWER PLAY (no hockey pun intended) - HP says 89% less power.

• Did I mention no support for Windows? Only officially supports Linux distros at this time.

My guess is that this box is aimed squarely at companies like GoDaddy and Rackspace, where they’re carving out virtual instances for clients and they want to cut datacenter power utilization as much as possible. I wouldn’t want to be the guy buying 45 VMware licenses. Unless your workload can easily be sharded onto a lot of servers, this design probably isn’t for you.