Partners: HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 Servers Will Help Fuel AI Market Growth

‘We think that private cloud AI and AI inference opportunity is going to be huge with Gen12 systems,' says PhoenixNAP Global IT Services Executive Vice President William Bell.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Wednesday launched eight new Intel Xeon 6-based HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers that will play a key role in helping partners capture the private cloud AI market opportunity, partners told CRN.

“We think that private cloud AI and AI inference opportunity is going to be huge with Gen12 systems,” said William Bell, executive vice president of products for PhoenixNAP Global IT Services, a Phoenix, Arizona-based cloud service provider. “We’re looking at opportunities around how do we work closely with HPE to have fully packaged (Gen12 AI) inference systems where an enterprise can get 20-30 of these machines to do all the proprietary AI work they want to do internally.”

The Gen12’s new capabilities with Intel Xeon 6 processors are locked and loaded to help enterprise customers attain the competitive advantages from emerging AI solutions in a private cloud rather than moving at scale to a public cloud AI based solution, said Bell.

“AI has been locked into an LLM-only model for the last three years,” said Bell, referring to large language models. “Now that we are moving forward into the making money era of AI, everybody is going to want to build some kind of chatbot or vision system. Customers are going to want to AI everything because the outcomes from AI are so substantial.”

Bell predicted a wave of AI solutions that will open the door for enterprise customers to leverage Gen12 systems to drive “efficiency and net new” revenue. “Over the next four years, the opportunity for AI inferencing is going to grow at a 5x rate,” he said. “The reality is that is going to drag forward the demand for general purpose computing. GPUs have to go into a box.”

PhoenixNAP Global IT, which was the first cloud service provider to offer Gen12 systems, grew its sales at a 300 percent clip in 2024 and with the AI revolution taking hold will likely grow at that clip once again in 2025, said Bell.

HPE has become a force to be reckoned with in the cloud service provider market because of its innovative systems and its strong partnering culture, said Bell. “HPE has turned their sales, marketing and product development on its head to help service providers be successful,” he said. “HPE has given us access to their teams and assigned the right people to meet us where we are at.”

HPE said six of the new Gen12 servers- the accelerator-optimized 4U, 2P DL380a, the total cost of ownership and power-optimized 1U, 1P DL320, the 2U and 1P DL340, the density-optimized 1U, 2P DL360 and the 2U, 2P DL380, and the small medium business/edge-optimized 2P Tower ML350 – will be available in the first quarter. The blade-optimized HPE Synergy 480 Gen12 and the big data-optimized 4U,4P DL580 Gen12 will be available in the summer.

Among the major benefits of the new Gen12 systems are a new independent security processor Secure Enclave that provides an additional layer of security protection within HPE’s iLO 7 remote monitoring platform with what HPE called “tamper-resistant protection for keys, passwords and security configuration,” especially critical for “vulnerable edge environments.”

HPE is also providing direct liquid cooling- which has been a big differentiator for HPE systems- for all of the Intel Xeon-based 1 and 2 socket Gen12 rack servers.

HPE Vice President and General Manager of Compute North America Scott Wood said one of the biggest differentiators for the Gen12 servers is the HPE Compute Ops Management (COM) platform, which is providing breakthrough AI-driven automation that has resulted in huge productivity and cost savings for customers. “The way we enable customers to manage servers now is completely different from what anybody else does,” he said.

In fact, Wood said, HPE is winning deals over competitors because of the “no holds barred” improved security and simplified management capability from HPE Compute Ops Management. That’s because Compute Ops Management is automating the perennial problem of updating firmware and software.

“COM allows you to secure your environment, lower your costs, improve your availability and reduce your people having to travel which has real dollar savings,” said Wood. “It is a different way to manage your systems. It is the number one thing I am excited about with Gen12.”

Compute Ops Management is also making it easier for partners to manage their customers’ IT environments, said Wood. “If we can reduce your costs with COM it either becomes a competitive advantage if a partner is competing against a partner doing it on a different platform or it reduces your cost to deliver that service which flows right to your bottom line,” he said.

Pat O’Dell, general manager and managing partner at Clinton, N.J.-based CPP Associates, for his part, said Compute Ops Management is a huge competitive advantage for HPE and its partners. “Customers appreciate the fact that it automates a lot of tasks and makes them more efficient,” he said.

Among the biggest game changers for the new Gen12 servers is the optimized performance and energy efficiency, which is going to be critical as customers adopt AI solutions, said O’Dell. “Almost all of our customers are looking at AI and that is where power efficiency becomes really important,” he said. “With Gen12 it is all about operational, cost or automation efficiency for our customers.”

Another big differentiator with Gen12 is the ability to team it with HPE’s new VM Essentials alternative to VMware, said O’Dell. “Nine out of 10 of our clients are interested in looking at alternatives to VMware whereas in the past they wouldn’t,” he said. “VM Essentials is big.”

Wood, for his part, said there is a “ton of interest” from customers looking at VM Essentials as an alternative. “The interest is super high,” he said. “The big driver with VM Essentials is cost savings and simplicity,” he said. “It is significant cost savings.”

In fact, Wood said, partners may be able to help customers “self-fund” the move to Gen12 with the VM Essentials licensing savings and the power savings from consolidating legacy systems. “VM Essentials just plays into the cost savings with Gen12,” he said.