A week before the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, HPE has announced a compact, rugged successor to the Edgeline EL4000. The Edgeline EL8000 Converged Edge System combines high performance in a rugged chassis that is only 70 cm deep.
Just before MWC in Barcelona, HPE announces a new solution for telecom providers to deliver more computing power at the edge. The new platform brings any type of enterprise workload to the edge. The new system supports the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
Edgeline EL4000, its predecessor, had only one Intel Xeon D on board. It is more efficient in terms of energy consumption, but offers significantly less computing power. The systems can be supplied with gpus or fpgas. In the past, those PCI Express cards were limited to a consumption of 75 watts. Now EL8000 supports up to 300 watts.
Rugged hardware
The new system is much less deep than its predecessor: 70 cm. The basic version measures half a rack wide. Two systems next to each other fit in a standard rack. This makes the EL8000 very interesting in smaller locations closer to the edge. Think of the concrete huts next to the telecommunication masts.
The hardware is rugged and operates between 0 and 55 degrees Celsius and supports cooling from front to back or vice versa. The nodes themselves are upgradeable to 100 gigabit and higher in the future. Interconnects can be provided with either Intel or Mellanox. In total, EL8000 supports up to 1.5 TB of memory and 16 TB of storage.
HPE iLO 5 allows for easy provisioning and remote management. For example, IT admins can conveniently view the health of the system and push updates. Samsung is embracing HPE Edgeline EL8000 for its 5G hardware and Mahindra is integrating the systems into 4G LTE infrastructure to prepare them for 5G in the future.
Placing data centres closer to the edge reduces response time and increases bandwidth. With the Edgeline EL8000 series, HPE also emphasises the importance of uniformity across the entire network. The form factor is heterogeneous. HPE relies on integration partners such as Samsung or Mahindra to roll out the systems.
Edge focus
The main focus of the Edgeline EL8000 is telecom providers, but according to HPE the solution is also interesting for critical environments where rugged equipment with high computing power is needed. Think of defence, retail or manufacturing.
HPE is going to focus more on edge computing. The technology giant wants to position itself as an edge-computing player and has therefore simplified its business plans in order to benefit from the method that optimises cloud computing. HPE wants to relieve itself of the burden of IoT-cloud platforms and network infrastructure.
Under the so-called HPE Next plan, for example, a large number of production sites will be closed down and, at the same time, the overall efficiency will be improved. HPE has announced that it wishes to have only seven of the seventeen production sites left and that it wishes to move from ten ERP systems to just one.
According to HPE, its growth strategy revolves largely around Aruba and edge computing, from where the company can build on hybrid IT and analytics in order to ultimately drive autonomous systems.
Related: HPE goes all-in on edge computing with new business plan
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.