HP ProLiant SL4500 server series overview

Technical white paper| HP ProLiant SL4500 server series
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Abstract
The growth of digital information in object storage, analytics, and distributed parallel processing environments is growing
exponentially. While you can simply add drives or drive arrays to keep up with data growth, the sheer volume of data can
impact your system’s ability to process and analyze information.
The HP ProLiant SL4500 server series provides a server and storage solution that closely couples large amounts of data to
the server nodes for efficient processing, sorting, or analyzing. Designed specifically for Big Data environments, this solution
reduces cost and power consumption over other storage-focused systems. It is also easier to manage and service. This
paper describes the purpose and technologies of the HP ProLiant SL4500 server series and provides use cases for
suggested applications.
Overview
The HP ProLiant SL4500 server is the first server built for Big Data and offers a breakthrough in economics, density, and
simplicity. The server is available in three combinations of compute and storage density (Figure 1). Each version balances
computational power and storage capacity for specific Big Data environments. The large drive capacity and efficient power
supplies allow up to 30% more storage density at the same power consumption. This design requires a minimal number of
cables and offers advanced management options.
Figure 1. The HP ProLiant SL4500 server series offers three basic configurations.
HP ProLiant SL4500 server series design
Chassis
The HP ProLiant SL4500 server series combines a choice of ProLiant servers and dense storage in the same chassis. Each
chassis can accommodate the following components:
• Three server nodes (maximum)
• 60, 50, or 45 large form factor (LFF) drives (for one-, two-, and three-node configurations respectively)
• Four HP common slot hot-plug power supply bays and five hot-plug fans
The 4.3U-sized ProLiant SL4500 chassis is deeper than a standard server. Due to the chassis depth, we recommend
mounting it in HP 1200mm deep racks for stability. The ProLiant SL4500 server chassis does mount in HP 1000mm racks as
well as third-party solutions with optional rail kits and rail kit adaptors. With a 13U adapter kit, three SL4500 servers will
mount in 13U of vertical space, allowing a 42U rack to contain nine SL4500 chassis. A spacer is also available to allow
standard 5U chassis spacing for an eight-server configuration in a 42U rack.
One-node chassis
• 60 drives
• 1M IOPS (single node)
• 180TB total capacity
• Ideal application:
Openstack
Two-node chassis
• 25 drives per node
• 1M IOPS per node
• 150TB total capacity
• Ideal application:
Microsoft Exchange
Three-node chassis
• 15 drives per node
• 1M IOPS per node
• 135TB total capacity
• Ideal application:
Apache Hadoop
Available 1Q 2013