Even though at present there are more talks about micro-servers than actual sales, in three years time they will account for over 1/7 of all server sales in 2015 due to changing market conditions. At least, Hewlett-Packard believes that servers running ARM and Intel Corp.'s Atom microprocessors will represent a relatively high market share in three years time.

HP was the first large server vendor to announce these servers, and the company expects that by 2015, ARM and Atom servers will represent 15% of the global server market. The company’s project Moonshot is developing new ultralow-power server technologies that will address the fast growing HyperScale server market and plans to offer the first commercial micro-server based on Intel Atom "Centerton" chips.

Project Moonshot is designed to fuel the advancement of low-energy server technology, while promoting industry collaboration to break new ground in “hyperscale” computing environments such as cloud services and on-demand computing.

HP’s project Moonshot combines central processing units (CPUs) with ultra low-power consumption with HP Converged Infrastructure technology to allow the sharing of resources – including storage, networking, management, power and cooling – across thousands of servers. It paves the way to the future of low-energy computing for emerging web, cloud and massive scale environments. In traditional servers each CPU (or two/four CPUs) has its own chipset, cooling, storage, power and other components, in Moonshot servers many CPUs share components.

^{Left: In traditional server each node has its own chipset, cooling, storage, power, etc.
Right: In Moonshot server many processing nodes share cooling, storage, power, etc.}

Through project Moonshot efforts, data center efficiencies are expected to reach new heights for select workloads and applications, consuming up to 89% less energy and 94% less space, while reducing overall costs up to 63% compared to traditional server systems.

Project Moonshot is a multiyear, multi-phased program that builds on HP’s experience powering the world’s largest cloud infrastructures and 10 years of extensive low-energy computing infrastructure research from HP Labs, the company’s central research arm.

Tags: HP, Hewlett-Packard, Moonshot, ARM, Atom, Intel, Centerton, Calxeda, Cortex