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HPE
ProLiant Servers

by Sherry Kercher

Copyright 2020, Faulkner Information Services. All
Rights Reserved.

Docid: 00018907

Publication Date: 2007

Report Type: PRODUCT

Preview

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s HPE ProLiant Server portfolio is a line of
servers aimed at both small-to-medium-sized businesses and large
enterprises. It features Intel and AMD processors and offers a number of
features including redundancy, embedded RAID controllers, virtual connect
technology, and integrated lights out (ILO). A recent addition to this
line is the HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10. This report provides information on
the HPE ProLiant Server product line and its main features.

Report Contents:

• Description
• Related Faulkner Reports
• Vendor
• Applications
• Environment
• Support
• Pricing
• Competitors
• Web Links

Description

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HPE’s ProLiant Server line of products is aimed at small-to-medium and
large businesses and features both Intel and AMD processors.

Designed for Efficiency and Effectiveness. HPE designed
ProLiant Servers to balance the needs for energy-efficiency,
effectiveness, performance efficiency, and cost in datacenters and IT
departments that face budget cuts and increased demand for computing
capacity. Features include smaller form factors to consolidate space
and reduced energy consumption through shared power and cooling.

ProLiant Servers’ main product lines are built for a distinct purpose.

HPE ProLiant for Private Cloud . HPE Helion Rack is a
hardened HPE ProLiant for Private Cloud offering delivered in a single rack.
It consists of four or more HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen9 Servers, 36 cores of
processing power, and 256GB of memory. Each server is optimized for future
scale out.

WS Server Blade Series. This series provides full
dual-processor workstation performance support from a remote data center to
a desktop client appliance over standard network. Users can simultaneously
connect from a single client device to multiple blade workstations.

400c Series. The 400c series offers features that are
intended to provide the same capabilities of ordinary rack servers in a
smaller, energy-efficient design. It provides remote management features,
as well as reliability features, such as Advanced ECC control, to improve
uptime.

600c Series. The 600c is a series of 4-socket server
blades that offer core processor servers with the latest AMD and Intel
servers. It offers large-scale memory, as well as enhanced system
redundancy capabilities. It is optimized for server consolidation, and was
designed to allow for the deployment of many virtual machines.

Table 1 outlines the features of select HPE ProLiant Server product
series.

Strengths

According to IDC, Dell Technologies held the top spot in the in the
global server market during the first quarter of 2020 with a revenue share
of 18.7%. HPE/New H3C Group was in second place with 15.5%, followed by
Inspur/Inspur Power Systems with 7.1%. Lenovo and IBM were tied for the
fourth position with market shares of 5.6% and 4.8%, respectively.
Overall, vendor revenue in the market decreased 6.0% year over year to
$18.6 billion during the first quarter of 2020. Worldwide server shipments
decreased 0.2% year over year to just under 2.6 million units in the
quarter. Volume server revenue declined 2.1% to $15.1 billion, and
midrange server revenue decreased 23.0% to just under $2.6 billion.
High-end systems decreased by 9.1% to just under $1.0 billion.¹

An IDC study found that by deploying virtual machines using Blade
Servers, IT organizations have been able to reduce infrastructure savings
by 17 percent.² Additionally, Demartek tested the ProLiant
BL460c Gen9 Server Blade and the BL460c Gen8 Server Blade, and found that
the BL460c Gen9 Server Blade outperformed the BL460c Gen8 Server Blade.
Also, the company determined that, when looking at similar configurations
of both servers that it used in testing, the cost of the Gen9 Server Blade
hardware fell 10 percent lower than the cost for the Gen8 Server Blade.³
According to researchandmarkets.com, the data center blade server
market is expected to reach $16.85 billion USD by the end of 2021, a
growth rate of 8.68 percent from 2016 to 2021.⁴

Weaknesses

BladeServers do not offer as many features as servers with more capacity.
They also do not support all operating systems or virtualized computing
environments. Additionally, HPE faces formidable competition in the blade
server market from vendors such as IBM, Dell, and Oracle.

Applications

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HPE’s ProLiant blades are designed for use in small to medium-sized
enterprise environments, as well as in large enterprise environments.

Environment

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HPE Integrity and HPE ProLiant server blades run in operating
environments similar to other HPE servers. BladeServers support certain
Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Linux, Micro Focus Novell SUSE Linux, Citrix
ZenServer, and VMware systems.

Support

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HPE offers customers off-site and on-site support. Users can choose phone
support, as well as next-day and four-hour on-site support options. HPE
also can install a customer’s hardware for an additional fee, in addition
to help-desk, back-up, and recovery options. Finally, the company offers a
one- to three-year warranty on all of its ProLiant Servers.

Pricing

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Prices for HPE’s ProLiant Servers vary in pricing according to how users
customize the blades. General pricing for select products is provided
in Table 2.

Competitors

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The ProLiant Server family competes against products such as IBM’s
BladeCenter, Dell’s PowerEdge Servers, and Oracle’s Sun Blade System.

Web Links

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• Dell: http://www.dell.com/
• HPE: http://www.hpe.com/
• IBM: http://www.ibm.com/
• Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/

References

• ¹ “Worldwide Server Market Revenue Declined 6.0% Year Over
  Year in the First Quarter of 2020, According to IDC.” IDC.
  June 9, 2020.
• ² Jed Scaramelia, Randy Perry. “Business Value of Blade.” IDC.
  April 2012.
• ³ Marketwired. “Demartek Evaluates HP ProLiant Gen8 vs Gen9
  Server Blades.” Sys-Con Media. July 14, 2015.
• ⁴ “Data Center Blade Server Market – Forecasts from 2016
  to 2021.” Researchandmarkets.com. February 2016.

About the Author

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Sherry Kercher is an editor for Faulkner Information
Services. She holds a master’s degree in library and information science,
and tracks and writes about storage, communication networks and equipment,
and Internet technologies.

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