News - Dell plans to promote ARM based server adoption

[HEXUS]

Better density, power efficiency and price.

Read more.

[3dcandy]

Interesting they only chose 1 DDR3 slot per node (processor) and only up to 8 gb as well. Also seems Marvell have done well - cpu's, switch and ethernet all provided by them...

[aidanjt]

Interesting they only chose 1 DDR3 slot per node (processor) and only up to 8 gb as well.

They're not aiming to take on crunching the numbers for the entire universe. These are the kinds of things which can run 90% of websites out there.

It'll probably suit Canonical's 'MaaS cloud' *shudder* paradigm very well.

I think the clincher will be price. If Dell can pitch these at a low cost it could be a big winner.

[HalloweenJack]

hmmmm i wonder when AMD will make there move into ARM

[3dcandy]

Oh I know what they're aimed for...just I'd have thought they *may* have gone with a bigger limit and perhaps 2 slots for more flexibility...

[aidanjt]

Oh I know what they're aimed for...just I'd have thought they *may* have gone with a bigger limit and perhaps 2 slots for more flexibility...

The flexibility is in being able to slot in more sleds. If you're running something like Hadoop, you scale up by adding computational nodes, instead of beefing up the resources of individual servers.

[3dcandy]

True...perhaps I just missed the point a tad...if they're cheap enough...

[scaryjim]

I used to test my ASP.NET websites on a Celeron 450 with 256MB PC-133 on Win 2000 Server. The Windows UI was a little slow when I was doing maintenance and management, but the server was fast enough. A modern quad-core ARM with a 64bit DDR3 memory bus to 8GB of RAM is going to fly for basic web serving, particularly if it's got an optimised software solution sitting on top of it.

Great idea this: 48 web server nodes in 3U and 750W (i.e. 3A in the UK) - ~ 16W per node. Be very interesting to see what AMD can provide in this space via Bobcat, and whether Intel can get Atom back into the microsever market too. They'll both struggle to get entire nodes into that kind of power envelope...

[crossy]

Currently there are no tier-one ARM-based servers as the market is immature and there is a lot of testing and development to do.

Hmm, very true, but I don't think that Dell are going to have it all to themselves. E.g. http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic..._testing_in_Q2

[Tattysnuc]

What server OSes can this use?

[aidanjt]

What server OSes can this use?

Linux and BSD have been ported to ARM.

[LSG501]

I personally like the idea but it really does depend on price.
Assuming they can be scaled up easily enough the savings on power could bring prices of hosting etc down which is all good in my view

[chrestomanci]

What server OSes can this use?

The woman presenting the video said Ubuntu 12.04.

Which is interesting seeing as until a couple of months ago, Ubuntu was not a supported OS on Dell hardware, if you wanted Linux, it had to be Red Hat. (Have you seen their Price list. It would have cost my employer $2K per server to run Red Hat with our usage model).

The servers are definitely very interesting. I did send the link to my boss, and ask if we could buy some, but seeing as the best reason I could come up with was how cool they where, he did not sign the purchase order. :-)

Also, I subscribe to the Debian-ARM mailing list, because I have an Arm based server at home, and I know that the Debian project does not have much in the way of ARM hardware for testing and automated builds. I hope that Dell could be persuaded to sponsor Debian and send them one of these servers so that the distro gets better.