Cloud Computing: Dell’s Testing ARM Servers
June 1, 2012
Not waiting for Calexda, Dell is developing its own low-power ARM-based microservers.
The dense, cheap widgets aren’t generally available. They aren’t ready for prime time yet.
Instead Dell’s got a seed program happening called Copper that won’t brighten Intel’s mood any since Dell is the second-largest maker of x86 servers behind HP, and HP is also skipping down the ARM path. What’s more, Dell, at least, is ultimately contemplating the enterprise mainstream despite the risk of cannibalization.
It said Tuesday morning that it’s shipped ARM-based clusters to a few "hyperscale" customers for evaluation and it’s putting demonstration clusters at Dell Solution Centers worldwide – as well as at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the supercomputing center at the University of Texas in Austin – where they can be remotely accessed by ISVs so they can develop the nascent ARM server ecosystem…
Dell reckons "the ARM-based server market is approaching an inflection point, marked by increasing customer interest in testing and developing applications." It "believes now is the right time to help foster development and testing of operating systems and applications for ARM servers."
It said it’s supplying servers to Canonical and Cloudera (think Hadoop, web front-ends and other specialized workloads) and will deliver an ARM-supported version of Crowbar, Dell’s open source management infrastructure software, at some point.
Dell’s using Marvell’s off-the-shelf MP-capable quad-core ARM-based 1.6GHz Armada chip and has put 48 of the SoC gismos, each paired with 8GB of DDR memory and four 3.5-inch SATA drives, in a 3U C5000 chassis. That makes 192 cores to a box or at least 2,688 cores in a rack.
It says it’s been testing ARM server technology internally since 2010, and has worked with select hyperscale customers "to understand their interest level and expectations for ARM-based servers."
ARM isn’t supposed to release a 64-bit server design until the end of this year at the earliest. Intel, meanwhile, is trying to get its low-end Atom chip to match AMD’s 15W power envelop. AMD bought SeaMicro, which is currently using Atoms and low-power Xeons and will likely go to ARMs at some point.
Like HP – which said so first – Dell is also reportedly working with Calxeda, the Texas start-up trying to get a production-level ARM server out.
Calxeda is building its own chip and fabric but Dell seems to have grabbed the initiative away from HP, its ISV-courting Project Moonshot and its proof-of-concept Redstone server nodes and is actually shipped something.
HP was supposed to have limited quantities of a HP-engineered 32-bit Calxeda box based on the Texan’s reference platform available for select customers this half. Nothing has been heard of it since November.
Given Dell’s announcement, rival Calxeda, backed by ARM itself, was left standing there saying, "We look forward to supporting Dell in this important initiative which will further expand the market for Calxeda technology."
Calxeda is supposed to get 2,800 low-power servers in a 40U rack, consuming perhaps 89% less energy and 94% less space than the usual Intel servers while reducing overall costs by up to 63%. It’s should be 97% less complex and reduce cabling, switching and peripheral devices
OpenStack is expected to support ARM. Ditto LAMP, Java, Fedora, and the KVM hypervisor. Microsoft is assumed to be in this play too. Facebook’s Open Compute Project currently uses the x86.
Oh, by the way, the Register stumbled across a thing called RedSleeve Linux, described as a "port of the upstream RHEL reworked to run on ARM RISC processors" and think it might come in handy if Red Hat drags its feet on an official port of RHEL to the ARM architecture.