HPE ProLiant Gen13 lays enterprise AI infrastructure groundwork
HPE's newest ProLiant servers add beefed-up memory and layered security features in anticipation of enterprise AI infrastructure interest and concerns about sensitive IP.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise unveiled the first wave of its next-generation of ProLiant servers, a collection of four platforms built on AMD's 6th Generation EPYC 9006-series SP7 processors.
HPE says this initial batch of Gen13 systems addresses growing enterprise interest in secure agentic AI workflows with extreme-density compute designs and a set of scalability updates, including high-bandwidth PCIe Gen6 digital transfer signaling, high-performance 16-channel Multiplexed Rank Dual Inline Memory Modules (MRDIMMs), and factory-level cryptographic isolation.
"Our first wave of Gen 13 is really all about high-performance, dense compute and AI, as well as agentic AI," said John Carter, HPE Compute vice president of product management, who leads HPE's mainstream compute division, during a press briefing.
"When you think about putting your mission-critical company IP out into an AI model where it's still a bit of the wild west, protecting that foundational silicon and firmware layer is the first step," Carter added.
Most enterprise organizations will eventually see agentic AI as a crucial part of their businesses, but many are still piloting and evaluating the technology, said Matt Kimball, vice president and principal analyst for data center technologies at Moor Insights & Strategy.
"I don't know that I see an 8-way GPU box as being mainstream for commercial enterprise, although it would be welcome for larger enterprises and first movers," Kimball wrote in an email, referring to HPE's new ProLiant DL585a model. "Agentic is shaping strategy and informing purchase decisions, but the velocity/volume commercial enterprise AI infrastructure acquisition phase has not yet started."
A set of four hardware models will be the first in a series of Gen13 releases. The staggered release schedule was influenced by the twin factors of hardware scarcity and corporate belt-tightening.
HPE did not discuss pricing, though it is offering customers a financing program that defers payments for the first 90 days, followed by 1% monthly payments for the following nine months.
The Gen13 Lineup
This series of four servers ranges from 1U pizza boxes to liquid-cooled rack-scale clusters.
ProLiant DL525: This is a standard air-cooled server that comes in a 19-inch 1U form factor with a single AMD EPYC socket that scales up to 256 cores. This unit bulks up on memory, with a 16-channel DDR5 and the bottleneck-breaking MRDIMM, alongside PCIe Gen6 lanes, which double bidirectional data throughput per lane, from about 4 GBps to 8GBps. This ProLiant is targeted at tasks that require large amounts of memory, such as high–frequency trading, fraud analytics, virtualization consolidation and electronic design automation (EDA).
ProLiant XD245 and XD285 Gen13: These two server configurations are for high-performance computing (HPC) systems and large-scale AI modeling. One is air-cooled, the other liquid-cooled. Both are built for the Open Compute Project (OCP) Open Rack v3 (ORv3) infrastructure. Both servers share the same motherboard design and fit into a 2OU chassis. The XD245 packs up to eight EPYC CPUs into four liquid-cooled nodes. The air-cooled XD285 has two nodes, each supporting up to four CPUs. These units are the descendants of HPE's Apollo and XD servers. They're meant to serve model builders and neo-cloud service providers.
ProLiant DL585a: This air-cooled server is built on a 10U chassis, which can accommodate two EPYC processors and eight full-length double-wide PCIe-based GPUs and accelerators. Given that enterprise AI clusters tend to hit power ceilings before they run out of data center space, the form factor has ample open space to aid cooling, according to Carter. The DL585a is best suited for AI tasks such as high-throughput inference, token generation and RAG-fine tuning.
The releases are scheduled through mid-2027 and are synchronized with AMD's own silicon delivery schedules.
The single-socket DL525 will be the first to be shipped later this year. The 8-GPU DL585a will follow in early 2027, and the XD245 and XD285 will be out later in 2027, giving HPE time to finalize the necessary facility, liquid-cooling and rack-scale integrations.
AI-ready, with security as a differentiator
HPE typically touts ProLiant's security and reliability, and this release cycle brings refinements in both areas.
This generation is the first to introduce Automatic Self-Encrypting Drives. Storage media can now be set to encrypt all data from its initial boot, without manual activation or key management software.
Also new is Multi-Party Authorization. For truly sensitive operations, an organization can require two parties to authorize sensitive out-of-band commands. Now, a lone rogue actor can't power down a machine, erase its contents or update its firmware without a second recognized administrator to validate the request.
Also, in terms of security, HPE has cryptographically secured its internal bus paths and device conduits to harden them against harvest-now, decrypt-later threats from potential future quantum computing systems, in line with the recommendations of the U.S. National Security Agency's Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite 2.0.
Platform security is becoming more and more of a requirement for IT infrastructure teams – especially in this AI era.
Matt Kimball, VP and principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy
For computer telemetry, HPE has also updated its out-of-band baseboard management controller, HPE Integrated Lights-Out 8 (iLO8). To help organizations better manage the influx of security advisories, HPE has updated its Compute Ops Management software-as-a-service monitoring console to correlate newly published CVEs and vendor advisories against what the customer currently runs.
"Platform security is becoming more and more of a requirement for IT infrastructure teams – especially in this AI era," Kimball said.
Though price and performance will remain the primary drivers of server procurement, security will, going forward, be a line item in requests for proposals, he said.
"In a market where many orgs are looking at servers as the kind of carrier for the chips they want to buy, differentiation is difficult to achieve," Kimball said. "Things like iLO8 and multi-party authentication can deliver that differentiation."
Freelance news writer Joab Jackson has been writing about back-end IT technologies for the past three decades. His grandfather programmed mainframes, and his father wrote computer games for hobbyist programming magazines in the 1980s.
