November 2012, London, United Kingdom

HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Scale Out ServerHP ProLiant SL4500 Gen8 Server

HP released the SL4500 series this month, with its aims solely at Big Data architecture. In these environments density is all important, and HP have chosen to use a non-standard height for the chassis - 4.3 RU. This is so as to accomodate 3.5" LFF SATA drives and server nodes at once.

If a standard 42 RU rack were populated solely with SL4500's the 4.3 RU height allows for a complete extra chassis compared to a 5 RU setup.

The SL4500 has two available node options, the SL4540 Gen8 - a dual socket Intel Xeon E5-2400 based node, and the SL4545 G7 - a dual socket AMD Opteron based node. The Intel nodes feature the lower-spec E5 chips that were released earlier this year, with 4, 6, or 8 cores available. The AMD nodes are available with either 6 or 8 core chips, with the same 'value' mindset.

HP ProLiant SL4500 Drive Bays HP SL4500 Disk Arrays

Both machines feature 12 DIMM slots, and up to 192 GB of main memory using 16 GB DIMMs. For the OS, there's two SFF SATA bays in the front, for use with either flash or spinning disks. Expansion wise, there's only the one PCIe slot. And for storage control, a Smart Array B120i RAID controller.

On the networking side, there's a choice of either 2 port 1GbE, or single port 10GbE controllers.

For storage, there's support for 2 TB SATA drives in the trays with future support for 4 TB drives in 2013. Capacity currently is set at 180 TB, with 240 TB available once the 4 TB drives are released.

The SL4500 can be configured in 3 main ways:

  • One node, 60 drives - for large storage requirements
  • Two node, 25 drives per node - for dense Exchange deployments
  • Three node, 15 drives per node - for parallel processing apps, with a requirement for decent core-to-spindle ratio

The ProLiant SL4500 supports multiple Apache Hadoop vendors, such as Cloudera and Hortonworks as well as OpenStack and MongoDB.

Please call your BSI account manager for details on pricing and availability - or contact us.

HP ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Scale Out Server

HP ProLiant SL4545 G7 Scale Out Server