Cloud Computing: Cavium Delivers Next Generation Xen Virtualization with ThunderX(TM) Family of Workload Optimized Processors

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cavium, Inc., a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking, today announced that Cavium’s ThunderX, family of workload optimized processors will support next generation of Xen virtualization. In addition, Cavium has joined the Xen Project as an Advisory Board member. The Xen Project technology is a Collaborative Project hosted by The Linux Foundation.

The ThunderX family of processors from Cavium delivers integrated virtualization support for both compute and I/O centric workloads. The Xen optimization for the ARMv8 architecture has proven to be the high performance hypervisor technology that can deliver the full set of virtualization features with optimal performance required by scalable cloud deployments and applications. The support for what we believe will be the largest multi-core ARMv8 implementation and multi-socket cache coherency in Thunder takes the Xen virtualization capability to a whole new level of performance and features…

As a Xen Project Advisory Board member, Cavium will contribute to and help guide the Project that has been a key technology for supporting virtualization on ARM-based servers with significant optimizations specific to the underlying ARM architecture.

"Citrix is the cloud company that enables mobile work styles. Citrix and Cavium have been collaborating within the open-source Xen Project community to bring efficient and high quality Xen virtualization to ARM processors, in particular building hypervisor support for next-generation interrupt controllers based on the GICv3 architecture" said James Bulpin, Senior Director of Technology, XenServer, Citrix. "We are very happy to see Cavium joining the Xen Project Advisory Board, a move that further strengthens the Xen Project community and demonstrates Cavium’s engineering commitment to it. We congratulate Cavium on the launch of their ThunderX Processor Family and eagerly anticipate system-level virtualization solutions at the hyperscale level of deployment based on this multi-core SoC."

"Xen Project virtualization is deployed in some of the largest hyperscale data centers in the industry. Our new ARM support for power optimized servers is tailor-made for scale out virtualized workloads. As a leader in ARM server architecture and design, security and networking processors, Cavium is uniquely positioned to leverage the strengths of our open software and play a key role in the future of cloud computing," said Lars Kurth, chairman of the Xen Project Advisory Board.

"Expanding our membership with the Linux Foundation is another example of Cavium’s commitment to the Open Source community in general and the Xen Project virtualization solution in particular. The combination of the virtualization support at the core of the ThunderX SoC family with demonstrated advances that Xen Project software is bringing to the ARMv8 architecture is a game changer for today’s large-scale data center and cloud computing environments," said Larry Wikelius, Director Thunder Ecosystems and Partner Enablement. "We look forward to working with the Advisory Board to continue Xen Project momentum in the server market."

Xen Project open source virtualization software is licensed under the GPLv2 with a similar governance structure to the Linux kernel. Designed from the start for cloud computing, the project is being used by more than 10 million users and is backed by years of development and deployment in the most demanding environments.

The ThunderX product family provides best in class 64-bit ARMv8 data center and cloud processors, which we believe will offer an unprecedented level of integration and industry leading ARMv8 SoC performance. With high performance custom cores, single and dual socket configurations, very high memory bandwidth, large memory capacity, integrated hardware accelerators, fully virtualized core and IO, scalable Ethernet fabric and feature rich I/O’s that enable best in class performance per dollar and performance per watt. The ThunderX family includes multiple workload-optimized SKUs that enable servers and appliances that are optimized for compute, storage, network and secure compute workloads in the cloud. The ThunderX processor family is fully compliant with ARMv8 architecture specifications as well as ARM’s SBSA.