Triple threat: Infrastructure security, performance, and low TCO delivered by ProLiant DL385 Gen10

[ComputeExperts]

Can your server save you money and improve your security while providing top performance capabilities? The HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 offers all of those benefits.

Less than 20 percent of the data coming from devices connected to the Internet of Things—approximately 600 zettabytes from 25 billion devices—is secure, according to a Moor Insights & Strategy whitepaper. You need a server solution that can boost your infrastructure security while providing leading performance and affordability.

Because today's applications and data come from a wide variety of sources, from mobile to cloud to IoT and more, that infrastructure must also be able to handle increasingly larger amounts of data moving on- and off-premises.

If your company doesn't have the platform capabilities necessary to meet the challenges of digital transformation, consider your options. One potential piece to support the capabilities of your data center is the HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Server.

Infrastructure security

At the heart of the DL385 is HPE's Silicon Root of Trust, a process that ensures your server will only boot up if the essential firmware images are validated by an immutable digital fingerprint. When you combine this Silicon Root of Trust with a cryptographically secured signature, it reduces opportunities for hackers to exploit gaps.

The Silicon Root of Trust can help you thwart cybercriminals by providing protection even before you turn on the DL385. The BMC (Baseboard Management Controller), HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) 5, works in tandem with the AMD EPYC™ 7000 Series processor at the core of the DL385, enabling the chips to jointly authenticate and validate your system prior to boot-up, ensuring it's free from malware. This protection is critical: According to the Moor Insights whitepaper, malware on average goes undetected for more than three months.

In addition to guarding against malware, this technology can stop exploits such as root kit and boot kit attacks, preventing those who would do harm from accessing your server before the OS is present. With the purchase of a new license, firmware verification continues to monitor and verify essential server firmware stored in your server. In the unlikely event of a breach, a new license called HPE iLO Advanced Premium Security Edition allows the firmware to be automatically restored to a previous state.

Lower total cost of ownership

On top of the initial price tag for your server, you have to consider upgrades, maintenance, scalability, agility and functionality of your infrastructure. With some server upgrades, that may mean you end up with a cost that's far higher than expected, necessitating a search for a new option.

Additionally, as Patrick Moorhead writes in Forbes, HPE enables you to take economic control one step further, and that's with total cost of ownership. The upgrade to the DL385 can help IT departments drive down overall operational costs. "The virtual machine (VM) density that can be achieved with this server should lead to real and measurable TCO savings, not just a line item on a spreadsheet," Moorhead explains.

But what does this mean for your current environment? You can calculate your own specific TCO and ROI benefit with the ProLiant TCO calculator. This tool allows you to break down your future costs with comparisons to your legacy system, and those comparisons can be customized to cover a specific number of years or to address a particular scenario. Depending on the servers deployed in your existing environment, by upgrading to the DL385, you can consolidate from four legacy systems to one Gen10.

Leading performance and price

Moving forward, all companies that wish to meet their digital transformation needs must have virtualization performance capabilities that can handle the influx of mobile, IoT, analytics, and cloud-driven applications. The DL385, built on an AMD EPYC™ 7000 Series processor, offers more cores, more I/O, and more memory bandwidth. This in turn means more VMs per server or more sophisticated VMs depending on business need. This also translates to leading performance for virtualization-intensive applications, and support for memory-centric applications, a key use case of busy IT environments.

You've probably seen a lot of factors contribute to the need for increased memory, with big data as the main driver. Moorhead writes that the DL385 "appears to be architected for in-memory databases as well as Hadoop distributions. The 4TB memory footprint and 16 memory channels in a two-socket configuration mean bigger datasets can be analyzed and transformed into business intelligence, faster than the servers that house them today."

The DL385 also helps you address data management issues. Having the ability and the agility to quickly process raw data into useful information is critical to your success in this era of instant access. If your infrastructure can't keep up, your organization will fall behind.

While HPE's server is new to the market and is currently being tested in real-world situations, it can provide your data center with significant speed and performance. It offers the full stack of EPYC processors with up to 32 cores per processor and 4TB of maximum memory, enabling you to handle large sets of complex data and making its processing capabilities faster. That extra speed can be the difference between your organization bringing in new business or losing to the competition. HPE Financial Services also offers advisement and a number of financing options to help keep costs affordable.

Tools for digital transformation

Check out these performance benchmarks to see if the time is right to deploy new DL385 servers in your data center. To determine if your infrastructure is at risk and how it could benefit from HPE's Silicon Root of Trust, read the whitepaper that demystifies this technology. Then go to the TCO calculator to see how much your aging hardware is costing you as you plan your digital transformation.

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Meet Server Experts blogger Sue Poremba, security and technology writer

Sue is a freelance writer based in central PA. She's covered cybersecurity and identity theft issues since 2008 with articles appearing in Forbes, Yahoo, NBC, CSO, and CIO, among other publications. She is also the author of several cybersecurity ebooks. In 2017, Onalytica named her in their list of 25 Top Female Cybersecurity Influencers.