HP has given more details on its Project Moonshot, explaining the platform is not intended to replace existing servers, but instead target the requirements of scale-out datacentre applications such as web hosting and cloud services, where energy costs and space requirements are more important than processing power.

Launched this week, the second generation Moonshot platform comprises a rack-mount enclosure designed to hold 45 individual server modules, each one based on an Intel Atom S1200 system-on-a-chip (SoC) that consumes 6W of energy, but with other options in the pipeline.

This is clearly a market where HP sees an opportunity, as companies operating web hosting and other cloud-based services are now looking at deployments that may run to tens of thousands of server nodes, possibly extending to millions in some cases.

Hence, HP is going out of its way with Moonshot to closely match the requirements of these customers, even down to promises of server modules tailored to running specific workloads as efficiently as possible.

It turns out that many of these service providers are operating on very thin margins, according to HP, and so the cost of the IT infrastructure operating them can be the difference between profit and loss.

Energy costs in particular are a key factor, so power efficiency is considered more important than raw processing power.

“Even back in 2007, the energy consumption of the cloud would have made it count as the fifth largest country in the world, if added together,” claimed Paolo Faraboschi, distinguished technologist at HP Labs, and one of the brains behind Project Moonshot.

When HP first started looking at what would become Moonshot, “we started realising that we were leveraging (processors) in servers that are generalised. If you are only processing web pages, you’re not really doing a lot of work, and so the processor is wasting energy,” Faraboschi said.

Further analysis showed that a lot of energy gets wasted when data is shuffled around the system, from processor to processor, for example.

“Aggressive integration, such as with an SoC, means there is less need to move data around from chip to chip, so we decided that maybe we should start building servers based on SoC,” he explained.

One customer that has been trialling the new Moonshot hardware over the past year is hosting firm Leaseweb, who pronounced it an ideal platform for entry-level services.

“We’re seeing an 80 percent reduction in power consumption, but with 50 percent of the performance level of the existing HP servers we had been using before,” said Marc Burkels, manager of dedicated hosting at Leaseweb.