We’ve been watching the ARM market develop over the past few years as these highly efficient chips that have been driving tablets and cell phones have been finding their way more and more into hyperscale servers. Well watch no more, today were are sallying forth. Why now? Because some of our biggest customers have told us that they felt the time is now to start working with these low powered, highly efficient chips for their servers.
HW + SW = Solution
Today we announced that we will be shipping the new Dell “Copper” ARM servers via a seed unit program to select hyperscale customers worldwide. But a server does not an ecosystem make so we are doing what we can to help partners and developers get started building out applications for the platform. Given that two of the key areas where the extreme efficiencies of ARM play particularly well are Web front-ends and Hadoop environments, we have “ARMed” key partners like Canonical and Cloudera with units.
Early days
At this point it is still early days in the world of ARM servers so we designed Copper specifically for developers and customers to create code and test performance, not for production. To help developers get started we have struck a partnership between the Dell Solutions Centers and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to provide devs with remotely accessible clusters to develop and collaborate on. And speaking of developers, Dells own devs are working to deliver an ARM-based version of our open source infrastructure management software, Crowbar.
Speeds and Feeds
And in case your wondering about the specs of the hardware:
- Dell Copper servers are a shared infrastructure design, which allows easy deployment and reconfiguration of the sleds.
- Each ARM server node draws about 15 watts max power, so the total power draw for a full chassis is less than 750 watts.
- The server nodes discover themselves and interconnect when deployed, so workloads can easily run across the entire 48 nodes.
- And it’s still powerful, with four ARM server nodes per sled, and 12 total sleds, bringing a total of 48 server nodes to a single 3U C5000 chassis.
Stay tuned for more…
Extra-credit reading
- The Time is Right – Introducing “Copper” – Dell blog and videos
- With Dell ARM-based “Copper” servers, Crowbar footprint grows -Rob’s Blog
- See what cloud can do! Dell unveils ARM servers – GigaOm
- Dell Intros ARM Servers As Test-Dev Platform For Low Power Consumption Apps – CRN
- Dell begins test deployment of ARM-based Copper servers – Engadget
- Dell Arms Future Servers With iPhone Chips – Wired
- Dell ARMs up for hyperscale servers – The Register
Pau for now…
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