HPE touts new ‘ruggedized’ ProLiant servers built to withstand ‘extreme stressors’

HPE has announced an expansion to its ProLiant edge portfolio, with a particular focus placed on supporting organizations operating in “harsh environments”.

The new HPE ProLiant Compute EL2000 chassis, which supports up to two HPE ProLiant Compute EL220 Gen12 servers or one EL240 Gen12 server, is designed specifically for applications in manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, and national security.

According to HPE, the new servers boast a range of performance improvements compared to prior generations, and can scale from eight up to 144 Intel Xeon 6 cores.

The EL240 Gen12 server is also available with Nvidia RTX Pro 4500 or Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell server edition GPUs.

Durability is a key focus here, according to HPE. The new server range can operate in extreme temperatures ranging from -40 degrees Celsius to 55 degrees Celsius, as well as environments with up to 95% humidity.

They’re also designed to compensate for heavy vibration from aircraft or ground vehicles, as well as electromagnetic interference (EMI) and environmental contaminants.

During a press briefing ahead of the announcement, Krista Satterthwaite, senior vice president and GM of HPE’s compute group, said the focus on durability and ruggedness comes in direct response to changing edge requirements.

“Every edge is different, and edge is hard,” she said. “Servers at the edge need to be tough across industries like retail, manufacturing, [and] telecommunications.”

“Workloads are running at edge locations that are understaffed, constrained by space power, connectivity, and security becomes even more critical because these environments are much more exposed, which means protection has to be built in from the start.”

HPE touts telecoms, defense potential

HPE revealed that each platform is now available with an “Environmental Ruggedization” kit, enabling organizations operating in harsh conditions to compensate for “extreme stressors”.

“We're introducing an environmental ruggedized kit that enables these servers to handle extreme stressors,” Satterthwaite told assembled media.

“These new offerings satisfy customer needs for purpose built systems that deliver highly reliable performance in harsh and highly distributed locations that are designed to operate remotely with end to end visibility and control.

According to HPE, the ruggedization features adhere to a range of standards, including US national security standards, which require validated server survivability capabilities in extreme temperatures or high or low altitudes.

Satterthwaite noted that growing demands for edge capabilities in the defense industry and the public sector have played a key role in the durability focus.

“That is one of the main focus areas, which is why we have so many things that we’ve pursued in terms of certifications for more ruggedized environments,” she commented.

“So big, big demand coming from the defense space, in particular in the public sector.”

John Carter, VP for mainstream compute at HPE, echoed Satterthwaite’s comments, noting that the systems will “go anywhere” and “withstand any environment”.

“We’ve seen demand and had customer conversations from everything from space stations to battleships, to Jeeps, to anything else you can think of,” he said.

Elsewhere, the new range also adheres to telecoms network equipment standards that support 5G and radio access network (RAN) availability in unattended environments.

On the telecommunications front, Carter told assembled media this is an industry where the company is seeing surging demand for edge capabilities.

“Telcos have really been embracing the edge for quite a while,” he said. “They’ve been expanding the 5G roll-outs, now they’re starting to look at 6G in the future, and that is requiring a new level of performance and compute.”

“But we have seen numerous different environments from different customers. It just depends on the provider. And we do work with those telco providers from everything from the extreme edge all the way back to the packet core,” Carter added.

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