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Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

dell.com

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Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#11

Post by tluyben2 »

ksec wrote: post #5

This is similar offering to SuperMicro 's MicroCloud. Except with ARM instead of x86. As much as i love ARM and want them to succeed. I dont think there are any advantage of using ARM in Server apart from Cost. And Since ARM is still vastly under power for many Web Server Operation its time just isn't here. May be two - three years later when 64Bit ARM with EightCore Chip costing less then $50 dollars. But even so In…

I don't know about servers (only use/used Xeon x86) and i'm not sure it's different software or if it's Win vs Lin, but I have never touched anything saying Atom on the package being remotely useful for anything while I have a lot of very useful ARM devices. When people coming up to me saying 'I have a new laptop' and then it has an Atom sticker on the front, I know what's going to happen; they'll bring it back after a few days. So Atom in my servers make me cringe. Probably that's not justified?

I do know that in the datacenter we are colo'd, the vast majority of stuff hosted on the dedicated servers there could just as well be hosted on a $5 ARM board. A lot of companies hire complete servers for hosting a website which gets 2 visitors/month. This is also my experience as a long term devop (used to be fulltime, now parttime); servers I maintain, even clusters I maintain, can be hosted on a few $ ARM boards. They want dedicated because it gives them a sense of security and not being 'disturbed' by other sites so an ARM 'server' would suit well in that case. With the power consumption difference and bare metal costs, it's many $100s vs a few $10 per month for the client.

Edit: somewhere in my brain i thought I saw very cheap Atom servers and I did; http://www.ovh.nl/dedicated_servers/isgenoeg_2g.xml . Currently in the OVH sold out mode, but when they are back i'll try one to see how it holds up with one of those minimal sites.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#12

Post by robabbott »

Take a look at the HP Moonshot servers for comparison: http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/products/...

These boxes have internal slots for 45 blades. The current generation blades are Atoms and run a variety of Linux OS offerings. Future blades will be geared towards memcache, GPU, and other types of clusters. I got a couple of these at work for eval a little while back, and it's a pretty interesting package.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#13

Post by ksec »

tluyben2 wrote: post #11
ksec wrote: post #5

This is similar offering to SuperMicro 's MicroCloud. Except with ARM instead of x86. As much as i love ARM and want them to succeed. I dont think there are any advantage of using ARM in Server apart from Cost. And Since ARM is still vastly under power for many Web Server Operation its time just isn't here. May be two - three years later when 64Bit ARM with EightCore Chip costing less then $50 dollars. But even so In…

I don't know about servers (only use/used Xeon x86) and i'm not sure it's different software or if it's Win vs Lin, but I have never touched anything saying Atom on the package being remotely useful for anything while I have a lot of very useful ARM devices. When people coming up to me saying 'I have a new laptop' and then it has an Atom sticker on the front, I know what's going to happen; they'll bring it back after…

Well for one I dont see any price advantage of ARM compared to Intel. ( In this area ) 8 Core Atoms are Cheap enough. The Atom you are referring to are First Gen Netbook Atoms. Which are indeed very bad without any serious software optimization. The Atom i am referring to is the newest Avoton C2750. Which will soon be available in the OVH new brand SYS range. Assuming every thing else stays the same, Memory, SSD/HDD, Network etc, the cost difference between a Atom Server and a ARM server are in the range of early double digit figure. And there isn't a $5 ARM broad. The ARM SoC provided by Marvell Amanda would have been double of that already. So the cost difference for a rented dedicated server between ARM and Intel Atom would be at most a few dollars difference per month. Not to mention Atom is still a lot of more powerful. Website usage have spikes, no one wants a server that could barely handle the load it is getting at today.

ARM has the advantage in Smartphone and Tablet where there are no software compatibility concern, and it is working at 100s mW range. In Servers these two advantage disappeared.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#14

Post by ansible »

rbanffy wrote: post #2

I couldn't find anything on pricing and availability, but, despite my enthusiasm for Windows-proof servers, I am not sure if having a lot of discrete servers in a 3U enclosure is better than having a lot of containers running on, say, 3 1U servers. Containers (or even VMs) are much more manageable than 48 physically distinct machines (to say nothing of having 4 on each board, meaning an upgrade or defect on one means…

If we could turn it into a NUMA machine with 48 CPUs, that would be a totally different story.

This particular version seems to only support 1Gbit Ethernet, so I don't know how well that will work.

Still, we're talking about 192 cores with 384 Gbytes of RAM, that's got to be useful for some kind of workloads. Can you get that kind of density with Intel or AMD?

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#15

Post by notacoward »

robabbott wrote: post #12

Take a look at the HP Moonshot servers for comparison: http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/products/... These boxes have internal slots for 45 blades. The current generation blades are Atoms and run a variety of Linux OS offerings. Future blades will be geared towards memcache, GPU, and other types of clusters. I got a couple of these at work for eval a little while back, and it's a pretty interesting…

Actually the closest comparison seems to be Viridis.

http://www.boston.co.uk/solutions/viridis/default.aspx

Both have 12 cards per shelf, each card containing four quad-core ARM processors. The Dell Copper cards are a bit beefier, at 1.6GHz and 8GB and 1.4GHz vs. 4GB for the BL Viridis, OTOH, the Viridis processors are 64-bit and the shelf is 2U instead of 3U, which might more than make up for the other differences.

At that density, the big differentiator is likely to be power (and therefore heat). Viridis claims 5W per server, which is even better than the SiCortex boxes I worked on. I don't see a number for Copper, so my gut tells me it's probably more. The question is how much more.

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#16

Post by mtgx »

I don't think these are ARMv8 (64-bit). Applied Micro should be the first one to the ARM server market with such chips, and I think they will be available soon:

http://www.apm.com/news/appliedmicro-announces-general-avail...

http://www.apm.com/products/data-center/x-gene-family/x-gene...

Re: Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

#20

Post by ghostdiver »

zokier wrote: post #9

They left out two most critical bits of info: power consumption and price. You can already get ridiculous amounts of x86 cores in a rack if you want, but those can get pricy to buy and to keep running.

This type of infrastructure is not insta win for many(most.. ?) of businesses. Even if the price will be low and the power consumption will make a difference, still there will be HUGE cost of rewriting software.

Not all businesses need to write scalable software, because their current technology stack is just good enough and will always fit to one beefy machine, but on the other hand it will never fit on one ARM server module.

ps. hardware is cheap, while engineering work isn't

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