News - Hewlett Packard to build ARM-based servers

[HEXUS]

Announces use of 1.5-watt Calxeda EnergyCore server-on-a-chip.

Read more.

[Jay]

I still don't see a place for these servers at the moment, with VMware you can host god knows how many servers like this on one box.

I am probably missing the point.

[shaithis]

Probably because HP make no-where as much money selling you 2-3 big servers as they do selling you a blade cabinet and a ton of blade servers.

[crossy]

I still don't see a place for these servers at the moment, with VMware you can host god knows how many servers like this on one box.

Yes, we do. Although I'm using VirtualBox at the moment because it plays nicer with my Ubuntu host environment. Agree with you that you're probably better off with big-iron instead. But then again, I've never been a big fan of blade servers.

I maybe should know this (it's a little embarrassing), but any idea what OS we/they are planning to run on these new servers? I thought Windows desktop for ARM was a while off, so lord only knows when/if we'd see "Windows Server (ARM edition)".

In fact, as far as I know, the only ARM server OS's are various Linux/Unix ports - specifically Debian and/or NetBSD. Not that I'm putting either of these two down - both excellent server OS's in my experience.

[abaxas]

I still don't see a place for these servers at the moment, with VMware you can host god knows how many servers like this on one box.

I am probably missing the point.

You can, but the box wont have the memory bandwidth or processing power to run them all at any great speed.

In the world of big computers, IO and memory bandwidth is all that really matters.

[Denis_iii]

What operating system would a ARM server run? VMware ESXi? Win Svr 8? I assume only Linux....

[abaxas]

What operating system would a ARM server run? VMware ESXi? Win Svr 8? I assume only Linux....

Linux linux or linux.

[shaithis]

Android server edition incoming?

[kingpotnoodle]

Linux, and not even all Linux either, you're basically limited to Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian of the major 'server' distributions (Fedora is a bit raw for production).

Missing support for SUSE and more seriously RHEL/CentOS is a major problem for ARM at this point, and there is a major question mark over virtualisation. The industry has taken a major step towards using virtualisation to make best use of our hardware, and it has advantages on x86-64, the big power is still available if one VM needs it. The many small core philosophy doesn't suit all workloads at all.

[Scribe]

Yes, we do. Although I'm using VirtualBox at the moment because it plays nicer with my Ubuntu host environment. Agree with you that you're probably better off with big-iron instead. But then again, I've never been a big fan of blade servers.

I maybe should know this (it's a little embarrassing), but any idea what OS we/they are planning to run on these new servers? I thought Windows desktop for ARM was a while off, so lord only knows when/if we'd see "Windows Server (ARM edition)".

In fact, as far as I know, the only ARM server OS's are various Linux/Unix ports - specifically Debian and/or NetBSD. Not that I'm putting either of these two down - both excellent server OS's in my experience.

http://blog.canonical.com/2011/11/02/hpmoonshot/ - one answer.

[Scribe]

I still don't see a place for these servers at the moment, with VMware you can host god knows how many servers like this on one box.

I am probably missing the point.

Power and space efficiency! Though Cortex-A9s are somewhat slower, take an A15 for example; you can natively virtualize it just like a typical server but you receive the performance of a 125 watt £800 intel hex-core device for significantly less cost with 4 ARM chips at 8 watts. There are some usage scenarios where you don't receive this ideal parity but for typical webservers it's great. Then comes 64-bit ARMv8 and its highspeed interlinking, removing many of the remaining barriers.

[Biscuit]

WebOS server edition

Right now there probably isnt a massive number of OSs for it but its probably all more of a plan for the future than anything else. The world is slowly moving towards the arm environment and HP are just trying to get ahead of the game and push things along a bit. Good move i reckon.

[crossy]

Linux, and not even all Linux either, you're basically limited to Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian of the major 'server' distributions (Fedora is a bit raw for production).

Missing support for SUSE and more seriously RHEL/CentOS is a major problem for ARM at this point, and there is a major question mark over virtualisation. The industry has taken a major step towards using virtualisation to make best use of our hardware, and it has advantages on x86-64, the big power is still available if one VM needs it. The many small core philosophy doesn't suit all workloads at all.

*BSD also runs on ARM - so that's a possibility.

I'm not sure you'd necessarily want to virt these boxes - they're so small (sub-"pizzabox" size) that you're really talking about an MPP or MASS (Massive Array of Simple Servers) type application. So as you say "not suitable for all workloads". Definitely a niche product - although it's a safe bet that a lot of these blades will end up running some form of Apache. I think we'll typically see these running application servers, maybe talking to an x64 blade that's running the database (or more usually a full blown x64 server).

Said it before - if you really like Virtualization then check out what IBM can achieve with their Power kit. When it comes to carving up powerful racks into lots of more useful servers, they're still "writing the book".