A Rack of ARMs: 16 cores in 1U

If you have been following my blog recently, you will probably have seen my advocacy of using servers with ARM processors in large scale-out environments due to their small form factor and very low power consumption. Both of which allows a single rack to host hundreds, if not thousands, of compute threads and increase application resilience; since, one or two downed nodes in a cluster of hundreds of nodes doesn’t have the same impact as one or two large virtualization hosts within a cluster of tens of nodes.

One new offering in the ARM server market is ZT System’s R1801e 1U rackmount chassis that houses eight nodes (or “System on Modules” in ZT-speak), one 80GB SSD per node, consolidated network by way of two integrated 4+1 Gigabit Ethernet switches, and is pre-loaded with Ubuntu Server. Each node has an ARM processor with dual Cortex-A9 cores, 1GB of DDR3 memory, 1GB of flash and the typical USB and SATA connections found in common systems. Read the rest of this entry »

Servers considered ARMed and dangerous

I have recently written that ARM-based processors are prime for debut in thin servers for large clouds serving up web applications. The combination of low power, small size and fully featured (some include network and PCIe controllers within the same die or package) makes it not only easier to integrate into small blades or compute modules, but also more economical.

Well, Marvell has announced a contender to the ARM-based server market: the Armada XP. As The Register reported, the processor contains four cores running at 1.6GHz, a DDR2/DDR3 memory controller, four PCIe x4 ports, four Gigabit Ethernet controllers, as well as additional connections for additional expansion. An interesting aspect of the processor is that the four cores can be ganged together and share a common pool of memory or the cores can run independently, each with its own segment of memory.

Although the processor would work great for many web application workloads, the processor can also be tasked for network applications, such as: firewalls, load balancers, VPN concentrator, network intrusion detection and/or prevention. Heck, if Cisco were to port their ASA code to run on ARM-based processors, I think we may have found a perfect replacement processor for the next line of security appliances. Another workload that the new Armada XP would compete very well in is the network-attached storage market, which Intel has also placed the Atom processor into. While the Armada XP cannot run Windows Storage Server, it can easily run various Linux distributions or various BSD operating systems with lower overhead and costs compared to a Windows Storage Server solution.

While it is not yet known how it will compare cost-wise with the Intel Atom processor, the fact the Armada XP has almost all of the features of a traditional northbridge, I/O hub and requisite network controllers included in the price and package might be enough to counter Intel’s discounting of the Atom processor. Then again, Intel would rather have people purchase servers with higher-margin Xeon processors with higher-margin I/O controllers and use virtualization. Granted, there are a lot of workloads that would do better on such higher-margin Xeon servers… for now.

A new look at cloud scale-out with ARM processors

With the rise of the smartphones and dependencies on web applications and the cloud, there has been one processor architecture that has taken the charge: ARM. Processors based on the ARM architecture have found their way into Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices, Android smartphones and tablets, upcoming Chrome OS netbooks and tablets, home network routers and home multimedia hubs. Some of the reasons for the proliferation of ARM-based processors include: low cost, low-to-very-low power consumption, decent processing power, and open development environment. Read the rest of this entry »

Hardware Bytes: Sun UltraSPARC T2 Servers