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Facebook goes ARM with Calxeda

semiaccurate.com

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Re: Facebook goes ARM with Calxeda

#11

Post by raverbashing »

dietrichepp wrote: post #9
wmf wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the advantage of such a service?

Compared with virtualization, it would be more secure. If a dedicated ARM (or Atom) microserver were competitive with mid-range VPS, people would buy it. Virtualization is "leaky", there are esoteric attacks against other guests on the same host that allow attackers to obtain encryption keys. Last time I checked, the mitigation strategy was to move to dedicated hardware. I doubt dedicated microservers will be compete…

Well, in a sense, I can buy a RaspberryPi with the money of 2-3 months of linode (depending on the accessories you want)

But the "hard part" is not having the HW, but keeping it online 24/7. Geez, I don't even have DSL at home (long story)

With linode and others I can reinstall at the click of a button, I get a dedicated IP, etc

It may be easy depending on your situation, still, VPSs seems to have more advantages.

Re: Facebook goes ARM with Calxeda

#12

Post by EwanToo »

dietrichepp wrote: post #9
wmf wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the advantage of such a service?

Compared with virtualization, it would be more secure. If a dedicated ARM (or Atom) microserver were competitive with mid-range VPS, people would buy it. Virtualization is "leaky", there are esoteric attacks against other guests on the same host that allow attackers to obtain encryption keys. Last time I checked, the mitigation strategy was to move to dedicated hardware. I doubt dedicated microservers will be compete…

Dedicated Intel Atom hardware is already competitive with VPS services, for example you can see the Kimsufi stuff from OVH

https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml

Hosted in the USA or France, prices from £8.99 a month ($12?) for an Atom server with 2GB of RAM.

Re: Facebook goes ARM with Calxeda

#15

Post by WestCoastJustin »

This reminded me of James Hamilton's blog post [1], about 48 Atom servers in 3U, or 624 servers into a standard 42U rack [2]. Shows you where the industry is headed.

[1] http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/12/11/MicroserverMarke...

[2] http://www.quantaqct.com/en/01_product/02_detail.php?mid=27&...

Re: Facebook goes ARM with Calxeda

#16

Post by wmf »

justincormack wrote: post #10

As far as I can work out from the details released so far, this is basically a standard backplane for "blade" (or microserver as they are now known) servers, based on PCIe x8 so it is simple and cheap, which just happens to be more of less what Calxeda was using anyway. I can't work out yet if there is a standard way of attaching RAM as well I don;t think so (yet). It has taken an open source project to make blade se…

Each microserver has SO-DIMM slots for RAM.

Although this project is vaguely similar to blades, it isn't hot-swap, it can't hold 2S/4S servers, and it's not clear how I/O consolidation will work. So it's pretty different from existing blades.

Re: Facebook goes ARM with Calxeda

#17

Post by justincormack »

wmf wrote: post #16
justincormack wrote: post #10

As far as I can work out from the details released so far, this is basically a standard backplane for "blade" (or microserver as they are now known) servers, based on PCIe x8 so it is simple and cheap, which just happens to be more of less what Calxeda was using anyway. I can't work out yet if there is a standard way of attaching RAM as well I don;t think so (yet). It has taken an open source project to make blade se…

Each microserver has SO-DIMM slots for RAM. Although this project is vaguely similar to blades, it isn't hot-swap, it can't hold 2S/4S servers, and it's not clear how I/O consolidation will work. So it's pretty different from existing blades.

Hot swap would not be that hard to add to pcie but I don't think they care. Sure there is ram per soc but the discussion implied they wanted to break it up more longer term...
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