The JBGeorge Tech Blog

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If you’ve followed some of the technology advances in the processor space, you’ve no doubt heard of the ARM architecture. We’ve seen ARM processors in a number of client devices, but they’ve not been widely adopted for server use due to additional feature needs, performance, and limited software ecosystem.

Well, today, Dell (the company I work for) announced some of the work we are doing behind ARM and ARM-based servers.

ARM, which stands for “advanced RISC machine,” is a 32-bit RISC instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. In the server context, it can allow systems to be deployed at the chip level to reduce space, power consumption and cost.

Dell has been testing with ARM since 2010, and has been working with customers to understand how they could benefit from the ARM architecture, as well as what their expectations were regarding ARM-based servers.

Dell “Copper” ARM-based server

Today, we announced development of “Copper”, an ARM-based microserver, optimized for the current maturity of the ARM server market, which is primarily focused on test / dev and ARM-based technology to test and optimize code. And for this predominant use case, the Copper server is a great fit in terms of size and costwith its lightweight design, low-power-consumption and excellent density.

Dell’s Copper server is specifically designed for this market, with a small acquisition size and price, lower power consumption, and ease of use, and if you’ve followed our open source solution to date, you know that enabling open source development is important to us.

Enabling customers and the ecosystem

Testing to date has found compelling performance per dollar and performance per watt advantages for workloads like LAMP stack based web front ends and Hadoop applications. In that vein, we’ve partnered with TACC, the Texas Advanced Computing Center to help work through workloads, use cases, etc. We are also working with key open source partners like Canonical and Cloudera to help drive this space as well.

And for those who follow our Cloud and Big Data solutions (like the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solutions, the Dell Cloudera Hadoop Solution, and Crowbar), you’ll be happy to know what our team intends to enable ARM in Crowbar as well. It has proven to be a great tool in deploying our solutions on bare metal and managing the overall solutions that we see a great fit for it in the ARM use case.

We’re obviously very excited about this announcement, so I’d welcome you to check out the links on the ARM / Copper announcement at the end of this blog and in the video below.

Until next time,

JBGeorge
@jbgeorge

More info:

• Learn more about what Dell is doing with ARM and the new “Copper Server” – www.Dell.com/ARMserver
• Learn more about ARM (Wikipedia)
• Learn more about Dell and Hadoop – www.Dell.com/Hadoop
• Learn more about Dell Crowbar – www.Dell.com/Crowbar