HPE expands ProLiant line with rugged edge servers

HPE has expanded its Proliant server family with a trio of new boxes aimed at supporting distributed AI and other workloads in all manner of edge locations. The new servers include two Gen12-based boxes known as HPE ProLiant Compute EL2000 chassis and the HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 server, all optimized for harsh or remote edge environments across branch offices, retail, manufacturing, factories, power plants, and national security-related operations, the company stated. “Purpose‑built infrastructure is not a feature or a certification. It is a system‑level design approach that accounts for environment, performance, security, and operations together,” wrote Aaron Lamond, product marketing manager, with Compute at HPE in a blog about the news.  “With 89% of customers planning to increase spending on edge intelligence, it is critical we understand what holds together in the data center is quickly revealed at the edge, where conditions are unpredictable, failure is impossible to hide, and managing distributed sites can be an operational blind spot, at best,” Lamond wrote in the blog. “At the edge, performance must remain predictable under heat, power limits, vibration, and limited access, not just impressive under ideal conditions.” With that in mind, the new EL2000 chassis is purpose-built for ruggedized edge environments. The platform is based on Intel Xeon 6 processor and supports up to two HPE ProLiant Compute EL220 Gen12 servers or one EL240 Gen12 server. The new servers, available only with the HPE ProLiant Compute EL2000, features: * Scalability from 8 up to 144 Intel Xeon 6 cores. * Support for space-saving CPU Thermal Design Power up to 350 watts to achieve higher performance. * Can operate in extreme temperatures ranging from -40 degrees Celsius to 55 degrees Celsius, as well as up to 95% humidity2, and can run in environments with heavy vibrations or electromagnetic interference. * Available with Nvidia RTX PRO 4500 or RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs (only on EL240 Gen12 server). According to Lamond, the system supports a range of use cases, from vision‑based quality inspection and predictive maintenance in manufacturing, to network edge and Open RAN deployments in telecom, to remote monitoring and command‑and‑control workloads in energy and public sector environments. Similarly built for resilience, the DL145 features an AMD EPYC 8005 processor with support for up to 84 cores, according to Lamond. AMD’s EPYC 8005 server CPUs are designed for edge environments. It’s mainly positioned to support applications, such as video analytics from security cameras, and, for example, IoT data processing and AI inference processing at the edge, according to HPE. All of the new servers include support for the latest version of HPE’s Integrated Lights Out (iLO) management technology, which lets customers diagnose and resolve server issues, configure and manage access, and perform a variety of other automated tasks aimed at improving efficiency, HPE stated. In addition, the servers can be centrally managed via HPE Compute Ops Management cloud-based platform, which lets customers control all HPE ProLiant servers from a single console, according to the company. The HPE ProLiant Compute EL2000 chassis and HPE ProLiant Compute EL220 and EL240 Gen12 servers will be available later in 2026. The enhanced HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 and an Environmental Ruggedization Option Kit are available now.