Big Takeaways from the HPE ProLiant Gen12 Deep Dive with Tech Field Day – Tech Field Day Takeaways

I'm Stephen Foskett, organizer and president of the Tech Field Day Event series, and I'm here to share my takeaways from our recent exclusive tech Field day event with HP's ProLiant team in Houston. H p's ProLiant team invited a panel of Tech Field Day delegates to come to their customer innovation center in Houston to learn more about the latest innovations in the ProLiant server line. Now, ProLiant is one of the most important and longstanding server products in the industry, and yet, you know, we haven't heard too much about it at Tech Field Day in a few years.

That's why it was great to get an update from the entire ProLiant product management team on the latest and greatest innovations in their Gen 12 ProLiant servers. My first takeaway from the HPE ProLiant server event was the fact that server hardware is still relevant. In fact, that was the topic of the Tech Field Day podcast that we recorded, but it was really obvious and evident during the entire discussion.

You know, they say that the cloud is just someone else's server. Well, that's true, and in many cases, the someone else's server is one of the servers that we saw when we were at this event. Essentially, companies that make servers are required to make specialized hardware that fits into the right niche to serve whatever application is going.

That's why these companies need to have a full line of servers that are fit to purpose. Everything from data center to cloud to HPC and Edge and modern servers are a lot more than just boxes of CPUs. These things have to be all about balance.

They have to have the right amount of CPUs, of course, but also memory, memory channels, IO expansion slots, space for accelerators, power cooling. There's a lot more in the box than you might think. Server makers are also really focusing on producing specialized servers.

To go along with the standard one U2 U four U type, uh, lineup that we've seen for many, many years, we got to see, uh, at the ProLiant, uh, event, we gotta see, uh, specialized servers like the DL 3 84 and the DL three 80 A. These are built around Nvidia, uh, GPU hardware. The 3 84, in fact, is essentially a pair of, uh, Nvidia Grace Hopper, uh, G-P-U-C-P-U, uh, the GH 200 combo.

The DL three 80 a has room for eight, uh, full size Nvidia GPUs, as well as, uh, Intel Zon processors. More and more companies are deploying those things for ai, uh, training as well as inferencing tasks, and that's why HPE had to build an entire specialized box with power and cooling to suit that. We also got to see a mighty little DL 1 45, which is a really cool edge server in a very, very clever package.

It's not the same size as a normal server. All the ports are on one end. It's got, you know, specialized dust filtering.

It's even a little bit more rugged than a normal server, and yet it's still the kind of server that you can deploy a standard application on. It's a very, very clever little piece of kit. We also got to hear a lot more about power and cooling, which is becoming more and more of a challenge as you're packing all these GPUs into the box.

We went pretty deep on liquid cooling of the CPU and we're even hearing about liquid cooling of other things like accelerators and even storage Security was also top of mind for customers of, of modern servers, and that's something that HPE talked a lot about when we were there. Now it's not maybe the security that you're thinking of. HPE scored points with the delegates by talking about supply chain security.

In other words, they're guaranteeing that these systems are built with the components specked out and customers can track them all the way from the factory, uh, into the truck all the way until the delivery to make sure that nobody has tampered with that server hardware. This continues even after the servers are deployed. They've got, um, as in the new Gen 12, they've got the IO seven, which has a secure enclave to store keys, and it'll check and validate the hardware that's installed to make sure nobody's messing around with the servers once they're up and running in the data center.

The company also talked a little bit about post quantum encryption algorithms that's been pushed forward as more and more, uh, quantum announcements are made and people wanna make sure that whatever encryption is included in the system is post quantum certified. I'm glad to see that companies like HPE are starting to put that into proc into practice now ahead of the Quantum Revolution, just in case things get broken in the future. As you can see, we learned a lot at h HP's ProLiant Compute Day with, uh, tech Field Day.

I really enjoyed spending time with the product managers. I, it it's very obvious that they care deeply about the components that, that they're responsible for of the server, whether, whether it's power and cooling or, uh, edge or air cooling, liquid cooling, you know, security. All of these folks are passionate about these products and that to me says a lot about the integrity of the product that they're producing.

It was also great to have such great, uh, panel of delegates brought in for this. As I said, we, we often haven't, uh, had a chance to learn about server hardware, so this was a real breath of fresh air for a lot, lot of them. And, and as well, they really appreciated some of the deep dives that we got.

I think we could have spent a lot more time with HPE and we look forward to going back and checking out other aspects of the company's product line. I also wanna give a special shout out to some of the, uh, content that the delegates have produced. Uh, we had our good friends, uh, on site like Jeff Powers, uh, recording some, uh, pretty cool behind the scenes interviews.

Uh, we've had some great writeups on, uh, LinkedIn as well as, uh, individual websites of some of these folks. So keep your eye on the Tech Field day social media channels as we share those in the coming weeks. Also, do check out that podcast episode I talked about where, uh, we discussed the continuing relevance of server hardware and check out the rest of the Tech Field Day social media.

Thanks for watching this episode of the Tech Field Day takeaways series on the Tech Field Day plus YouTube channel. If you enjoyed it, please do subscribe and give us a, like the Tech Field Day Plus channel is something new and we're pretty excited to be able to share some of this behind the scenes takes on, uh, with you. Follow Tech Field Day on X, Twitter, blue Sky or Mastodon for more updates.

And check out all of the presentation videos on the Tech Field Day website and YouTube channel. Thanks for watching and we will catch you at the next Tech Field Day with more Tech Field Day takeaways.