Hewlett-Packard is tweaking its ProLiant server line to meet the steadily growing computational demands of big data applications.

HP's new ProLiant SL4500 server line, unveiled Thursday, are smaller, faster and more energy efficient than the industry standard servers organizations are currently using for big data applications, Daniel Bounds, director of Hyperscale product marketing at HP, said in an interview.

When tackling big data projects, organizations typically take an industry standard server, connect it to storage and start building their environments using a "siloed" approach involving disparate components. Bounds said this approach is overly complex from a management standpoint, not to mention expensive due to the additional data center space and cabling required.

[Related: HP Paves Path To Cloud With New ProLiant Gen8 Servers]

HP's new ProLiant SL4500 servers come in multiple configurations that aim to solve these problems. The ProLiant SL4500 features storage density up to 240 terabytes in a single 4.3-rack-unit chassis, or 2.16 petabytes with nine servers in an industry-standard 42-U rack.

With this level of storage density, organizations can keep a lid on their data center space requirements, thereby saving even more money, Bounds said.

The new ProLiant SL4500 servers include HP's Smart Cache technology, which debited with the ProLiant Gen8 launch last year and feature seven times faster input/output operations per second than HP's Gen7 servers.

Bounds described the ProLiant SL4500 as a "foundational component" to HP's big data strategy.

"This server takes a big step forward in providing a baseline for many customers," he told CRN. "It is tuned for enterprise and Web-scale customers looking to unlock object storage and parallel data analytics, as well as email, which is also big data."

Big data applications are geared toward extracting valuable information from massive amounts of data routinely generated by organizations in retail, banking and financial services, and public sector firms.

In some cases the software for the ProLiant SL4500 will come from HP, and in others, from third parties. HP has an AppSystem today that is tuned for Apache Hadoop, while Hadoop vendors Cloudera and Hortonworks are also developing data analytics apps, according to Bounds.

HP is building solution stacks with Vertica and Autonomy, as well as open-source applications, he said.

HP's ProLiant SL4500 servers are available now and priced starting at $7,643 for a single node configuration.

HP is also updating its line of high-performance computing servers. Its new ProLiant SL270s Gen8 server supports up to eight Intel Xeon Phi processors or eight Nvidia Kepler graphic processing units and will be available next month priced starting at $6,166.

PUBLISHED NOV. 15, 2012