In May 2014, HP and Foxconn announced a joint venture to build a new class of cloud servers. Today at the Open Compute Summit, HP and Foxconn publicly displayed the first fruits of the venture in the form of the new Cloudline server product family.

The Cloudline product family includes three new servers. At the entry level is the CL1100, which is a 1U server powered by 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors and 8 x DDR4 memory slots. The CL1100 supports two drives for storage.

In the middle is the CL2100, which is powered by the same Intel Xeon processors and provides 16x DDR4 memory slots and up to 8 storage drives.

At the top end is the CL2200, a 2U server that HP is positioning for big data and storage-intensive cloud applications. The CL2200 includes 4 x 1 GbE embedded network interface cards and has support for up to 12 SAS/SATA drives.

"Cloudline servers were purpose-built for cloud-scale environment, based on three key elements – scale, openness and cost," Dave Peterson, Group Manager, Cloudline Product Management, told ServerWatch. "These three elements combine to meet the unique needs of cloud-scale providers, who may be using OpenStack or other open standards software infrastructures."

HP's existing ProLiant servers are also able to meet some of the same needs, though Peterson noted that the Cloudline is not a competitive alternative.

"Cloudline servers are meant to complement the existing lineup of ProLiant servers, not replace them," Peterson said. "Cloudline products have a very distinct focus on service provider requirements (scale, open design and cost focus) and as such as have a different feature set than ProLiant and Moonshot offerings."



Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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