HPE Announces AMD Powered Gen 10 ProLiant DL385 For Software Defined Workloads

By Greg Schulz – www.storageioblog.com November 20, 2017

HPE Announced today a new AMD EPYC 7000 Powered Gen 10 ProLiant DL385 for Software Defined Workloads including server virtualization, software-defined data center (SDDC), software-defined data infrastructure (SDDI), software-defined storage among others. These new servers are part of a broader Gen10 HPE portfolio of ProLiant DL systems.

24 Small Form Factor Drive front view DL385 Gen 10 Via HPE

The value proposition being promoted by HPE of these new AMD powered Gen 10 DL385 servers besides supporting software-defined, SDDI, SDDC, and related workloads are security, density and lower price than others. HPE is claiming with the new AMD EPYC system on a chip (SoC) processor powered Gen 10 DL385 that it is offering up to 50 percent lower cost per virtual machine (VM) than traditional server solutions.

About HPE AMD Powered Gen 10 DL385

HPE AMD EPYC 7000 Gen 10 DL385 features:

2U (height) form factor
HPE OneView and iLO management
Flexible HPE finance options
Data Infrastructure Security
AMD EPYC 7000 System on Chip (SoC) processors
NVMe storage (Embedded M.2 and U.2/8639 Small Form Factor (SFF) e.g. drive form factor)
Address server I/O and memory bottlenecks

These new HPE servers are positioned for:

Software Defined, Server Virtualization
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) workspaces
HPC, Cloud and other general high-density workloads
General Data Infrastructure workloads that benefit from memory-centric or GPUs

Different AMD Powered DL385 ProLiant Gen 10 Packaging Options

Common across AMD EPYC 7000 powered Gen 10 DL385 servers are 2U high form factor, iLO management software and interfaces, flexible LAN on Motherboard (LOM) options, MicroSD (optional dual MicroSD), NVMe (embedded M.2 and SFF U.2) server storage I/O interface and drives, health and status LEDs, GPU support, single or dual socket processors.

HPE DL385 Gen10 Inside View Via HPE

HPE DL385 Gen10 Rear View Via HPE

Other up to three storage drive bays, support for Large Form Factor (LFF) and Small Form Factor (SFF) devices (HDD and SSD) including SFF NVMe (e.g., U.2) SSD. Up to 4 x Gbe NICs, PCIe riser for GPU (optional second riser requires the second processor). Other features and options include HPE SmartArray (RAID), up to 6 cooling fans, internal and external USB 3. Optional universal media bay that can also add a front display, optional Optical Disc Drive (ODD), optional 2 x U.2 NVMe SFF SSD. Note media bay occupies one of three storage drive bays.

HPE DL385 Form Factor Via HPE

Up to 3 x Drive Bays
Up to 12 LFF drives (2 per bay)
Up to 24 SFF drives ( 3 x 8 drive bays, 6 SFF + 2 NVMe U.2 or 8 x NVMe)

AMD EPYC 7000 Series

The AMD EPYC 7000 series is available in the single and dual socket. View additional AMD EPYC speeds and feeds in this data sheet (PDF), along with AMD server benchmarks here.

HPE DL385 Gen 10 AMD EPYC Specifications Via HPE

AMD EPYC 7000 General Features

Single and dual socket
Up to 32 cores, 64 threads per socket
Up to 16 DDR4 DIMMS over eight channels per socket (e.g., up to 2TB RAM)
Up to 128 PCIe Gen 3 lanes (e.g. combination of x4, x8, x16 etc)
Future 128GB DIMM support

AMD EPYC 7000 Security Features

Secure processor and secure boot for malware rootkit protection
System memory encryption (SME)
Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) hypervisors and guest virtual machine memory protection
Secure move (e.g., encrypted) between enabled servers

Where To Learn More

Learn more about Data Infrastructure and related server technology, trends, tools, techniques, tradecraft and tips with the following links.

AMD EPYC 7000 System on Chip (SoC) processors

Gen10 HPE portfolio and ProLiant DL systems.

Various Data Infrastructure related news commentary, events, tips and articles

Data Center and Data Infrastructure industry links

Data Infrastructure server storage I/O network Recommended Reading List Book Shelf

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC 2017) Book

What This All Means

With the flexible options including HDD, SSD as well as NVMe accessible SSDs, large memory capacity along with computing cores, these new solutions provide good data infrastructure server density (e.g., CPU, memory, I/O, storage) per cubic foot or meter per cost.

I look forward to trying one of these systems out for software-defined scenarios including virtualization, software-defined storage (SDS) among others workload scenarios. Overall the HPE announcement of the new AMD EPYC 7000 Powered Gen 10 ProLiant DL385 looks to be a good option for many environments.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

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