phoenixNAP Becomes the First in the World to Deploy a High-Performance, Power-Efficient Solution for Cloud-Native, Scale-Out Compute Workloads

While growth is the main goal of many businesses, scale comes at a price. Increased costs and management complexity can put the brakes on expansion. To tackle these challenges, organizations constantly strive to find ways to maximize performance while staying on budget and keeping their IT infrastructure easily manageable.

Striking this balance was a challenge for phoenixNAP, a global IT service provider focused on continually expanding their footprint and perfecting their diverse Infrastructure-as-a-Service portfolio.

Originally established as a Network Access Point (NAP) in Phoenix, Arizona, phoenixNAP has evolved into a full-service data center and one of the main network hubs of the U.S. Southwest. Today, we support a range of clients from SMBs to enterprises across 18 global data centers and network PoPs. Our flagship product, Bare Metal Cloud, offers businesses the ability to deploy and manage high-performance physical servers with cloud-like ease and simplicity.

Part of our success comes from our ability to keep pace with our customers’ evolving requirements and needs. For example, we’ve automated deployments and introduced edge-to-cloud computing to our product portfolio. We’ve also seen that AI is transforming how clients consume data center resources.  This pushed us to optimize our server portfolio to better accommodate modern, data-intensive workloads such as AI training and inferencing or High-Performance Computing (HPC).

To meet evolving market demands and empower clients with comprehensive IT infrastructure solutions, partnering with reliable, innovative hardware vendors is essential. HPE is one of our key partners, helping us deliver automated, dedicated infrastructure solutions—not only to our clients but also to our internal teams handling updates, storage and compute configurations, and server troubleshooting. At the end of the day, the more we automate everything, the more room we have for strategic planning and adding value to our products.

Recognizing the importance of infrastructure modernization

As VP of Products at phoenixNAP, I spearhead product innovation from our Amsterdam office. I oversee the evolution of our infrastructure and automated provisioning platform, ensuring we deliver market-leading IT solutions that empower clients worldwide. We take pride in our solution enabling clients to automatically provision and manage bare metal servers in minutes via API, CLI, or WebUI. However, our excellent partnership with HPE helped us continue to be one of the first to deliver as-a-service access to next-gen server technologies.

We were already using HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers with 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. We were also offering ARM-based server instances powered by HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 servers, which helped us venture outside the x86 ecosystem. In short, I already knew that HPE had a future-forward mindset that could help us further update our infrastructure to provide the processing power and energy efficiency our clients demand. I was looking forward to gaining access to their cutting-edge hardware and offering it to clients who demand maximum performance and optimal power management for their cloud-native workloads.

As it turned out, HPE was preparing to release its Gen12 servers featuring the latest, Intel Xeon 6 processors. These new chips boasted significant gen-on-gen performance gains and offered advanced power management features that substantially reduce energy consumption. As such, they were the perfect mix of increased CPU core count and throughput our clients required.

We wanted a modular, open approach at the hardware layer to increase core density, reduce workload costs, and simplify our infrastructure operations across our fleet. Confident in HPE’s capabilities, we were the first customer in the world to order HPE ProLiant DL320 Gen12 SP servers, and the benefits of the upgrade were immediate.

Increased automation for easier maintenance

We aim to avoid having dozens of IT team members spending endless hours installing updates, deploying servers, and managing infrastructure. The new HPE servers allowed us to further enhance our automation-driven operations. With HPE ProLiant servers, a single engineer can handle everything with a few clicks and this seamlessly aligns with our existing workflows.

Using HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO), my team can remotely manage our HPE ProLiant servers anywhere in the world. I can limit access to a select group of IT administrators who can connect to servers across our global network instead of going on-site to troubleshoot or plug in an ethernet cable. They can even reboot and restore servers that are asleep or that have crashed—and all of this saves us time, effort, and ongoing operational expense.

Our clients rely on phoenixNAP to deliver compute, storage, and network capacity wherever and whenever needed. They rely on our infrastructure to scale, and HPE iLO makes it easier for us to monitor and manage equipment and quickly deploy their systems remotely. After all, our infrastructure is their infrastructure, and we want our clients to feel confident that we can accommodate their business as they expand.

Supporting an influx of AI infrastructure

Partnering with HPE enabled phoenixNAP to expand our business and make tomorrow’s technology available to anyone while continuing to support our enterprise SaaS, FinTech, AdTech, and SLED clients. These companies are likely to embrace AI in the coming years through small- to mid-size RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) technology—if they haven’t already. This technology will enhance the accuracy and reliability of their models with external data, and we will be able to support their data processing needs with our new HPE ProLiant DL320 Gen12 SP servers with Intel Xeon 6 technology.

Our next step is to install additional HPE ProLiant servers featuring Intel Xeon 6 CPUs at our data centers. These units will provide additional capacity while being customized and validated for servers using NVIDIA GPUs, the industry standard for AI applications. Using HPE technology, we are currently meeting 70–80% of our customers’ processing needs. Once these new servers are deployed, we will be able to handle even more.

A future that enables doing more and being better

HPE backs its products with outstanding support, and their engineers are highly responsive. The human factor played a big part in our decision to complement our infrastructure offering with HPE ProLiant Gen12 servers. If we’re having trouble with an automated workflow or a server starts acting up, we can reach out to HPE and usually get an answer within hours. Even when dealing with something more complex, HPE never fails to find a solution.

Having a partner who can help us sort out infrastructure challenges allows us to deliver a reliable and highly available product to our clients and ensure their business stays operational no matter what.

That said, HPE hardware isn't just about doing more; it's about being better. Our HPE ProLiant DL320 Gen12 SP servers are resilient and reliable enterprise-grade devices that allow us to meet and exceed our customers' expectations.

The combination of cutting-edge hardware, flawless and frictionless automation, advanced remote management, and peerless technical support empowers phoenixNAP to do more in less time, broaden our reach, and offer our customers solutions that work.

With HPE, we are keeping our Bare Metal Cloud future-proof and making deeper customer connections. I am proud to be an HPE Xeon 6 launch partner and the first worldwide customer to order and deploy HPE ProLiant Gen12 SP servers in our production environment. We are not only dreaming about growth; we are making it happen.