By Emeka Aginam

Committed to improving data center efficiency lifecycle,  Hewlett-Packard (HP) in collaboration with Intel Zion Processor has launched a US $300 million HP ProLiant Generation 8  (Gen8) servers, a new line of servers acclaimed to be “the industry’s most self-sufficient”.

The new Generation 8 systems are the product of Project Voyager, is an initiative which aims to add more intelligence, automation and consideration for optimizing power utilization,  system configuration in management and providing more efficient performance.

The regional Manager of HP Mr. Chukwuma Okpaka while speaking at event  disclosed that HP Proactive Insight architecture offers powerful new capabilities that automate and  simplify system provisioning; troubleshooting and software updates which empower IT resources to eliminate as much as 50 percent of their daily maintenance tasks, reallocating this time  to innovation for their business.

“HP ProLiant Gen8’s ProActive is designed to provide continuous intelligence on the health of servers, power usage and other important diagnostics. This will allow online system  updates be deployed three times faster, with as much as 93pc less downtime.

“The demand for data intensive and transactional workloads such as data warehousing, real-time analytics and virtualized environments is expanding dramatically, necessitating a  fundamental change in the way computer and storage services integrate” he said.

According to HP estimates, manual operations like server updates can take up to five hours of an IT administrator’s time per rack but HP Smart Update feature is said to perform the  same update in 10 minutes or less.

For  HP Service and Tech Sales manager, Seun Sholanke servers are intended to appeal to a spectrum of organizations from as few as 20 users and up.  “This goes across the market from the SMB (small-to-medium business) space up. The whole concept of the HP Smart Update feature is going to benefit everybody.

He said “Typically, IT departments spend 70pc of their time keeping the lights on; Smart Update is looking to switch that on by itself. You’re getting back so much time and that is going  to be of interest in the smaller operations that could save an organisation 20-30 people or fewer,” Solanke disclosed.