Boston has partnered with Calxeda, the ARM server chip startup, to bring energy sipping servers to market. By Prashant L Rao
ARM dominates the mobile processing space in the same way that Intel does the PC and, to a certain extent, server world. Much as Intel is attempting to extend its dominion into the mobile space, ARM is trying to move into the server space.
Since ARM’s business model has always revolved around partnerships, the actual chips are being made by Calxeda, which has, in turn, partnered with Boston to bring them to market. Boston is shipping a 2U box with 48 of these energy-efficient chips and it’s bullish about the prospects of this technology in the server space where it is a specialist.
“We have been looking for low-power server technology for many years,” commented Manoj Nayee, Managing Director of Boston India.
Boston’s take is that Intel-based technology can only go so far when it comes to bringing down the amount of energy consumed by a server. Therefore, it decided to look for an alternative. Since ARM has been around in the mobile technology field for a long time and it was entering the server space, Boston decided to build a server around ARM processors.
“A Xeon processor consumers 100 watts upwards whereas an ARM server processor sips 5 watts or less,” said Nayee.
There’s a right tool for every job and the Boston Viridis server that employs ARM-based Calxeda EnergyCore SoCs (Server on Chip) is a rack mountable 2U server cluster with 48 of these SoCs or 192 processing cores that is being targeted at some specific workloads.
The workloads in question include Web apps that are written in PHP, Ruby etc; apps in Big Data where there are lots of parallel apps that have to be run across separate servers; pretty much anything that requires a large amount of storage and video streaming. Obviously, not every use case will fly on this platform. As Nayee put it succinctly, “You wouldn’t want to run a SQL Server database on an ARM-powered server.”
The biggest advantage of deploying an ARM-based server is the power savings that it brings to the table. Each Server on a Chip (SoC) consumes just five watts of power. Then there’s the fact that Boston is stuffing 48 of Calxeda’s SoCs into a 2U enclosure. Low power consumption also translates to less heat being generated, which means a simpler setup.
In terms of application support, you need to recompile the code. The key, according to Nayee, is to identify the apps that will run best on the ARM SoC.
“We have an ecosystem in terms of people developing solutions for this architecture. There are lots of Open Source and Commercial offerings,” he added.
In terms of the addressable market, Boston is targeting Cloud computing, storage applications, Big Data, etc. It expects to ship about 5% of its x86 volumes in the first year.
“You don’t always need a server with 64 GB RAM running lots and lots of apps. You could separate the apps and run them on lots of low-energy individual servers instead,” concluded Nayee.
With HP deciding to go with Intel Atom processors for its Project Moonshot, which was originally meant to be powered by ARM-SoCs, Boston’s first out of the gate with this product and it could mean big things for the vendor. The availability of Viridis could well be the shot fired across the bow in server-land where Intel reigns supreme on the open platform front at present.
