Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced plans to ship a new wave of ProLiant servers with silicon-based security protections, automated management features, and flexible capacity management options.
Scheduled to reach market this summer, the ProLiant Gen10 server family made its debut on the first day of Palo Alto, Calif.-based HPE’s Discover conference in Las Vegas.
The new security technology in those products, which has been in development for 2 years, establishes a direct, permanent, and cryptographically secured relationship during the manufacturing process between each unit’s processing hardware and firmware. The result is what HPE calls a “silicon root of trust” that locks out firmware-level exploits and malware all the way from the factory to production deployment.
“A lot of times, systems are actually intercepted in transit and compromised,” says Mark Potter, HPE’s senior vice president and CTO. “Because of the way we’ve done it, it now gives us a way to protect from the point of origin or manufacture of that system all the way through to production and operation.”
Other firmware security enhancements in the ProLiant Gen10 portfolio include behavioral analytics functionality based on technology HPE acquired in February through its purchase of Niara Inc. and real-time threat detection technology that both spots attacks as they happen and remediates them automatically. According to Potter, similar technologies from competing hardware makers simply shut down servers after sensing an infection.
“We feel it’s very important to keep the system up and running,” he says.
According to HPE, the innovative defenses showcased today combine to make the ProLiant Gen10 family the world’s most secure industry standard servers.
“We have set a new bar,” Potter says.
The new ProLiants are 30 percent faster than their Gen9 predecessors on average too, HPE claims, thanks in part to the company’s Scalable Persistent Memory technology, a non-volatile storage system designed to provide DRAM performance. Introduced last spring, it enables HPE’s latest servers to perform application checkpoint operations up to 27 times faster and database restores up to 20 times faster.
Further boosting the ProLiant Gen10 family’s performance is new “Intelligent System Tuning” functionality developed in partnership with Intel that dynamically executes “jitter smoothing,” core boosting, and other application accelerating functions in response to changing workload requirements.
To make administering its new servers easier, HPE has equipped them with a new edition of its integrated Lights-Out (iLO) firmware that executes maintenance upgrades automatically. And to make buying them easier, the company has expanded its Flexible Capacity pay-as-you-go purchasing program. Available through the channel since 2015, Flexible Capacity lets businesses procure on-premises compute resources via the same kind of consumption-based pricing that public cloud providers utilize.
“You therefore can have the choice of turning your own infrastructure into a public cloud-like experience,” observes Alain Andreoli, senior vice president and general manager of HPE’s Data Center Infrastructure Group.
An addition to Flexible Capacity unveiled today†called the HPE Capacity Care Service lets businesses lower server TCO through active measurement and management of their resource utilization. Available for any ProLiant Gen10 server and appropriate for midsize organizations and up, according to HPE, the new offering will arrive in the fourth quarter of the year.
To discourage customers from freezing server acquisitions until the new Gen10 servers begin shipping, HPE also introduced a leasing program today that lets companies replace Gen9 hardware they purchase now with Gen10 models later.
“Our customers have the opportunity to continue to invest in their Gen9 infrastructure, and then we provide an easy way to transition,” says Ana Pinczuk, senior vice president of HPE Pointnext, the service offering HPE launched in March.
HPE’s Discover event continues through Thursday. Also announced there today were a new asset tracking solution for customers of HPE’s Aruba wireless networking unit and a new set of Linux-based servers for SMBs.
