Moonshot 1500: A small server, but a big step for HP

Hewlett-Packard just had its most innovative moment in years. How do we know this? Well, the company has ushered forth a new creation under the Project Moonshoot banner, created a scripted webcast to accompany the product, and even had guys who would normally wear suits dress down in sports coats and jeans to model the product, thus underscoring its hipness.

What HP has built is a new server — the HP Moonshot 1500. It's special because it runs on Intel's low power Atom chips, which usually go into mobile devices. As a result, HP has been able to design an entire computer server that's about the size of an envelope and then pack hundreds of these together into a single system that basically functions as an ultra compact supercomputer. According to HP's stats, the new server uses 89% less energy, takes up 80% less space, and costs 77% less than more traditional server designs.

The HP Moonshot 1500 both is and isn't revolutionary. To its credit, HP has pushed compact server designs to the extreme and crammed an awful lot of computing power in a small amount of space. This type of system has been designed for web and cloud computing companies that tend to buy thousands upon thousands of servers and need them to run as efficiently as possible. By using smartphone instead of beefier server chips, HP has provided a product that can handle the lightweight task of feeding up Web pages without consuming a lot of electricity. (Such a server would not be as well suited to, say, processing millions of transactions or large calculations.)

The problem is that most web giants such as Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google already design their own servers and have an Asian contract manufacturer produce them. HP, though, might have a strong play if you look longer term. It's basically betting that more traditional companies will come to want and need similar computing systems as the web giants. Overall, HP wants to convey that it's an innovator again.