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HPE Solution Architect here -- HPE has 4 lines, 3 public / 1 private. DL385 and DL325 are rack based servers aka traditional pizza box. DL385 is your workhorse

HPE Solution Architect here -- HPE has 4 lines, 3 public / 1 private. DL385 and DL325 are rack based servers aka traditional pizza box. DL385 is your workhorse platform. DL325 is a 1P design based for heavy PCIe connected (read: NVMe) devices. The CL3150 is a cloudline server and will likely be more consumed in the service provider space, in my opinion. The Apollo 35 is available to top 200 volume accounts (which has been annouced publicly, but is not available to your everyday customer.) This type [of information leak] is my worst nightmare as someone who works with resellers, letting these types of documents in the wrong hands or somehow access is breached like this. Edit 2: I am a server SA, MASE. I configure servers all the time. If customer demand shows the swap, you could see the proc move over to other lines, such as blades and the HPC markets.

spilk 8y ago
I'm not super familiar with HPE's product lines but I'm just kind of surprised they are still using the Apollo name. Maybe we'll see some Silicon Graphics branded HP gear too?
- JohannFlobuster 8y ago
  SGI stuff is already rebranded to the apollo name and Superdome Flex (UV300 I think it was before) Depending on your SGI server, the name may have gone into the appropriate HPE family name. If you need help with our new decoder ring, I'd be happy to point you in the right direction. I expect HPC workloads to take advantage of AMD chips, but I do expect many of the mathematical improvements that the Skylake instruction set provides to amplify desire in the computational HPC/numerical computation/ non-GPU stuff.
LinuxBender 8y ago
Very nice. I will make sure our server teams know they can get Epyc. Hopefully we are already testing the Spectre impact on Xeon vx. Epyc.
- JohannFlobuster 8y ago
  I'd love to know your results privately if you would share, as I have several customers who were impacted by Spectre/Meltdown and are also doing private benchmarks.
old-gregg 8y ago
Super-curious: have you seen much customer-driven demand for AMD EPYC, i.e. for reasons other than Xeon availability? AMD processors have been affected to a lesser degree to speculative execution exploits, they're cheaper and (if I'm not mistaken) offer more PCIe lanes, etc. Also, do you expect 7mm EPYC to do well in your space? Thanks!
- JohannFlobuster 8y ago
  Depends on market segement. I've seen alot of demand for Epyc in workloads that are sensitive to memory bandwidth. Just so much to offer when you max out 8 channels. They are cheaper due to fabrication process. The PCIe lane story is stuff of fanboys. It comes at a cost, power and heat. Secondly, anyone looking at an NVMe box should be looking at AMD in my opinion. The trick is if you are doing a VM farm, mixing Intel and AMD aint the best idea, as you all know. I see EPYC ticking up fast. In terms of exploits like Spectre/Meltdown, I'm pretty sure the exploits AMD claimed were not vulnerable, they ended up pushing out microcode for anyway. So its a moot point. I HAVE come across alot of customers who have DOUBLED their core count due to Spectre/Meltdown mitigations, and they are attracted to AMDs, high core, lower cost options. But remember, the power draw is different and always test/PoC!
  - mmt 8y ago
    > The PCIe lane story is stuff of fanboys. It comes at a cost, power and heat. Could you unpack this a bit? Specifically, I'm curious if the cost is a premium per lane (e.g. W/lane greater on AMD than on Intel) [1]. Also, is that cost at all affected by the I/O volume or merely the CPU being power-hungry overall? [1] Of course, that assumes everything else being equal, which it can't be, as well as equal proprotion of PCIe utilization, which is unlikely.
    - JohannFlobuster 8y ago
      Ive had a few customers test AMD and found a higher operating temp and determined it was due to higher power consumption. On paper, you get more lanes at a lower TDP w/ AMD. In practice, as always, your results may vary. Test! PCIe lanes and counting them is funny math. Do the homework on system boards, how they communicate, and the tax of moving information between processors. However, I would say their tests were short, and AMD processors have 3 power operating modes. There was also a neat blog posted somewhere (I think on here...) a little while back suggesting that the AMD proc did not need to run at advertised power on the customer procs. It was about compile times and how much power still resulted in good times. That was consumer-grade Ryzen chips tested though.
yuhong 8y ago
Can you comment on the September/October availability claims?
- JohannFlobuster 8y ago
  I hate doing this, but because this is sensitive, I have copy pasta-d the HPE Customer statement from our Customer Presentation on the issue: HPE, along with all other server vendors, is starting to see supply constraints on various Intel Xeon-SP processors—commonly referred to as Skylake—used in our Gen10 servers. –Intel is supply tight on Skylake SP HCC, Skylake SP LCC, Skylake SP XCC, and Skylake W LCC processor series. –Customer demand for various Skylake server processors is exceeding short-term supply. –Intel is working diligently to increase supply but indicates limited ability to materially improve Skylake availability potentially through December 2018.
exikyut 8y ago
Thought I'd ask a followup question for the sake of others here who might appreciate the answer: What sorts of evaluation opportunities do you provide for Intel vs AMD processor comparison? Besides short-term on-site placement, this could even look like remote access to a specifically-provisioned lab environment. Something like this would be pretty cool to evaluate a wide range of processor/memory/storage/etc combinations. I'm absolutely sure this almost certainly exists but I thought it would be interesting know how it actually works. (I'm not in the server hardware industry, but am very interested in how it works)

spilk 8y ago

I'm not super familiar with HPE's product lines but I'm just kind of surprised they are still using the Apollo name. Maybe we'll see some Silicon Graphics branded HP gear too?

JohannFlobuster 8y ago
SGI stuff is already rebranded to the apollo name and Superdome Flex (UV300 I think it was before) Depending on your SGI server, the name may have gone into the appropriate HPE family name. If you need help with our new decoder ring, I'd be happy to point you in the right direction. I expect HPC workloads to take advantage of AMD chips, but I do expect many of the mathematical improvements that the Skylake instruction set provides to amplify desire in the computational HPC/numerical computation/ non-GPU stuff.

LinuxBender 8y ago

Very nice. I will make sure our server teams know they can get Epyc. Hopefully we are already testing the Spectre impact on Xeon vx. Epyc.

JohannFlobuster 8y ago
I'd love to know your results privately if you would share, as I have several customers who were impacted by Spectre/Meltdown and are also doing private benchmarks.

old-gregg 8y ago

Super-curious: have you seen much customer-driven demand for AMD EPYC, i.e. for reasons other than Xeon availability? AMD processors have been affected to a lesser degree to speculative execution exploits, they're cheaper and (if I'm not mistaken) offer more PCIe lanes, etc. Also, do you expect 7mm EPYC to do well in your space? Thanks!

JohannFlobuster 8y ago
Depends on market segement. I've seen alot of demand for Epyc in workloads that are sensitive to memory bandwidth. Just so much to offer when you max out 8 channels. They are cheaper due to fabrication process. The PCIe lane story is stuff of fanboys. It comes at a cost, power and heat. Secondly, anyone looking at an NVMe box should be looking at AMD in my opinion. The trick is if you are doing a VM farm, mixing Intel and AMD aint the best idea, as you all know. I see EPYC ticking up fast. In terms of exploits like Spectre/Meltdown, I'm pretty sure the exploits AMD claimed were not vulnerable, they ended up pushing out microcode for anyway. So its a moot point. I HAVE come across alot of customers who have DOUBLED their core count due to Spectre/Meltdown mitigations, and they are attracted to AMDs, high core, lower cost options. But remember, the power draw is different and always test/PoC!
- mmt 8y ago
  > The PCIe lane story is stuff of fanboys. It comes at a cost, power and heat. Could you unpack this a bit? Specifically, I'm curious if the cost is a premium per lane (e.g. W/lane greater on AMD than on Intel) [1]. Also, is that cost at all affected by the I/O volume or merely the CPU being power-hungry overall? [1] Of course, that assumes everything else being equal, which it can't be, as well as equal proprotion of PCIe utilization, which is unlikely.
  - JohannFlobuster 8y ago
    Ive had a few customers test AMD and found a higher operating temp and determined it was due to higher power consumption. On paper, you get more lanes at a lower TDP w/ AMD. In practice, as always, your results may vary. Test! PCIe lanes and counting them is funny math. Do the homework on system boards, how they communicate, and the tax of moving information between processors. However, I would say their tests were short, and AMD processors have 3 power operating modes. There was also a neat blog posted somewhere (I think on here...) a little while back suggesting that the AMD proc did not need to run at advertised power on the customer procs. It was about compile times and how much power still resulted in good times. That was consumer-grade Ryzen chips tested though.

yuhong 8y ago

Can you comment on the September/October availability claims?

JohannFlobuster 8y ago
I hate doing this, but because this is sensitive, I have copy pasta-d the HPE Customer statement from our Customer Presentation on the issue: HPE, along with all other server vendors, is starting to see supply constraints on various Intel Xeon-SP processors—commonly referred to as Skylake—used in our Gen10 servers. –Intel is supply tight on Skylake SP HCC, Skylake SP LCC, Skylake SP XCC, and Skylake W LCC processor series. –Customer demand for various Skylake server processors is exceeding short-term supply. –Intel is working diligently to increase supply but indicates limited ability to materially improve Skylake availability potentially through December 2018.

exikyut 8y ago

Thought I'd ask a followup question for the sake of others here who might appreciate the answer: What sorts of evaluation opportunities do you provide for Intel vs AMD processor comparison? Besides short-term on-site placement, this could even look like remote access to a specifically-provisioned lab environment. Something like this would be pretty cool to evaluate a wide range of processor/memory/storage/etc combinations. I'm absolutely sure this almost certainly exists but I thought it would be interesting know how it actually works. (I'm not in the server hardware industry, but am very interested in how it works)