Moonshot: a milestone in hyperscale

Canonical recognised the emerging hyperscale trend over five years ago. We understood that advances in chip design, software and networking would enable a new paradigm of massive scale out server technology, so we invested in supporting and optimising for low power chips from both ARM and Intel which feature in hyperscale systems.

Yesterday, our leadership in hyperscale was again recognised in HP’s Moonshot project, a revolutionary server technology based on a complete scale out architecture, built with Ubuntu. The combination of the hardware’s shared architecture, densely packed low power chips – both Intel and ARM – and a scale-out application stack delivered and powered by Ubuntu, gives Moonshot breakthrough efficiencies in density, energy, cost and simplicity.

Canonical has been involved in the development of HP Moonshot from its inception. We were the first to enable HP Moonshot with ARM designed chips, normally used for phones and mobile devices. Ubuntu is the only OS integrated and fully operational across the complete Moonshot System, covering x86 and ARM chip technologies.

“A new wave of workloads demand breakthrough efficiencies in density, energy, and operational costs which can be scaled to a customer’s IT environment,” said Paul Santeler, vice president and general manager, Hyperscale Business Unit, HP. “Canonical has been working with HP for the past two years on HP Moonshot, and with Ubuntu, customers can achieve higher performance with greater manageability across both x86 and ARM chip sets.”
With hyperscale, new demands are placed on operating systems and particularly on the management and orchestration layers. The reality is that today only Ubuntu, with its cross-architecture scale out capabilities, Landscape Systems Management and Juju orchestration tools, is perfectly suited to the needs of massive scale out and hyperscale servers.

Hyperscale will completely change the way enterprises design, deploy and manage servers. HP Moonshot provides a system architecture that demonstrates and embodies that change. We’re looking forward to the next products lined up for release, some of which might include customised workload cartridges, allowing us to optimise the system for specific applications – web hosting, content delivery, and big data applications – where hyperscale is ideal.

We invite you to read more about the product and our offering on our HP Moonsot page

For more information on Ubuntu and hyperscale, go to ubuntu.com/server/hyperscale

For details of the HP Moonshot product line, link to HP Moonshot