Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/campaigns/project-copper

by esolyt • 13 years ago

94 93 13 years ago

rbanffy3• 13 years ago

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 needles downtime for three others).

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

thu• 13 years ago

It is written "there is no general availability" (even if they are shipping to selected partners).

leoc2• 13 years ago

From what I recall hearing, the initial demand for ARM "micro-servers" has been from big, um, Facebook-ish operations for whom cost is king rather than smaller, enterprisey places where versatility and manageability are higher priorities. That would seem to fit with the limited availability.

_mvuc2• 13 years ago

Me: "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!"

Them: crickets

ansible• 13 years ago

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?

ris4• 13 years ago

Still, we're talking about 192 cores with 384 Gbytes of RAM

Seeing as you're going to be keeping 48 copies of the same OS in that memory whether you want to or not, you're going to need those 384G.

rbanffy3• 13 years ago

Can you get that kind of density with Intel or AMD?

The new Xeon Phi's will have an external DDR3 bus. It's a different beast, intended for a different usage, but I always loved to misuse technology ;-)

diminish• 13 years ago

exciting days ahead, if each node costs 2digits. The cpu is 64or 32bits?

zokier3• 13 years ago

With 8GB of ram, I'd assume that they are 64bit.

PyErr_SetString• 13 years ago

If I'm not mistaking, ARMv7 supports PAE, which will allow you over 4 GB of memory. Perhaps not all in the same process, but still...

_delirium2• 13 years ago

It says it's got Marvell Armada XP CPUs, which are ARMv7 CPUs, therefore 32-bit instruction set (the 64-bit instruction set was introduced in ARMv8).

e40• 13 years ago

The most important question, not addressed anywhere on that page. I'm guessing 32-bit because the 64-bit ARMs were supposed to come out next year.

ksec3• 13 years ago

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 Intel's Atom would have a similar performance with similar price. According to some new test on the Soon to be available 8 Core Atom for Server it is surprisingly performance / watt.

To simply put, the server market has longed for a low power part for certain type of usage scenario. And Intel will soon has that covered.

tluyben23• 13 years ago

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.

ksec3• 13 years ago

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.

polshaw2• 13 years ago

FYI (re: consumer Atom) Intel have just started taking Atom seriously again, after majorly neglecting it for the previous 5 years. The current Silvermont/Bay Trail is twice as fast as the last, bringing C2D+ performance (eg 2010 MBA) with tablet thermals and battery life. It will now be on Intel's primary process too, so the days of Atom universally sucking are over (thanks ARM).

zokier3• 13 years ago

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.

ghostdiver2• 13 years ago

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

_delirium2• 13 years ago

That really depends on what kind of software you're running. There's a wide range of portable C/C++ Unix stuff that compiles fine on ARM. If you run a distro like Debian or ubuntu, you can just install the armhf port and have all that stuff.

Where it gets tricky is if it's something written for an environment that itself has no ARM port yet, such as the JVM.

fest• 13 years ago

Not being an expert on servers, I can see a possible use-case for low-power servers like this: strongly disk-bound tasks (e.g. infrequently accessible storage area).

Although, a cost analysis might be required- I suspect that a more powerful CPU with a lot more disks may end up costing less (per unit of disk space vs total power consumption).

robabbott• 13 years ago

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.

notacoward6• 13 years ago

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.

ris4• 13 years ago

I don't know where you're getting the 64-bit thing from, but beyond that, comparing clock speeds between a Marvell Armada XP and the EnergyCore in the Boston machine is essentially meaningless.

mtgx• 13 years ago

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...

wtracy4• 13 years ago

Are there any ARM servers currently available to Normal People?

I got excited when I first saw the headline because the last time I looked I didn't see anything available in the hobbyist/small business price range.

rwmj• 13 years ago

No. Also there is no 64 bit ARM hardware available to anyone (if you ignore the extremely locked-down iPhone 5S). I have used a bunch of ARM servers, but unfortunately I'm under NDA.

However there is interesting hackable ARM hardware around. I would recommend looking at the CubieTruck, Mele A1000G Quad (make sure it's the "Quad" variant), and possibly the ODROID-XU. I write about these and others on my blog (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/)

leoc2• 13 years ago

It depends what you mean by a server: the Utilite http://utilite-computer.com/web/home with its dual gigabit Ethernet ports might be enough for some applications.

_mvuc2• 13 years ago

The heck with the prices. They not only won't tell you how much it costs, they will practically come right out and tell you that you, as one of the Great Unwashed, will never be able to buy one of these. Because they won't sell to you, period, for any amount of money, unless you're some kind of incorporated fictional creation that's willing to enter into all kinds of onerous contracts before they're even willing to speak to you further.

tobykier• 13 years ago

Intel astroturfing contact is out in force today

happywolf2• 13 years ago

Given ARM reigns the mobile space, and if it gains traction in the server market, it will put tremendous pressure on the PC market which lies in between.

iSnow2• 13 years ago

Well, there's always intel. Don't count them out yet, they won't sit on their hands and smile as ARM eats their lunch. I guess, the backlash will come soon.

venomsnake2• 13 years ago

It won't - it may evolve or change the PC market but it won't pressure it. People will need computing powerhouses and big monitors.

My predictions are that we will hit cloud disillusionment soon and people are going to rediscover the benefits of home storage and GPU power.

happywolf2• 13 years ago

The issue is CPU no longer is the bottleneck since a while ago. My three-year old laptop with a then high-end graphics card still serves me well. There of course are still some people who need powerful CPUs, but I guess most people will need more powerful GPU instead of CPU.

lhl2• 13 years ago

While there's a certain class of PCs that won't be much affected anytime soon (high-end gaming, workstations), ARM is already inching into the HTPC/home server space.

There are a bunch of i.MX6-based boards w/ GigE, SATA, and a surprisingly strong GPU/VPU that, being very lower power consumption, are very well suited for always-on use. They also work well enough media playback, web browsing, etc.

You can see both AMD (APUs) and Intel (NUCs) aiming into that same target, but they'll face stiff competition - the ARM systems are much cheaper, about $100 for fully functional boards.

wlievens2• 13 years ago

Is there a JVM for these?

wtracy4• 13 years ago

Apparently Oracle has an "early access" version of Java SE for ARM. I'm pretty sure that there are a few open source VMs floating around with ARM support, but I wouldn't count on any of them being full drop-in replacements for Oracle Java.

(Obviously there's a bunch of J2ME and other embedded implementations, but I assume that's not what you're looking for.)

wlievens2• 13 years ago

Nope. We're going to build a small compute cluster for java 7 code. It's for a few dozen cores so nothing huge. I love these embarrassingly parallelizable problems so the idea of using cheap servers has some appeal to me. Though the individual job run time matters too so we need something somewhere in the middle.

dham• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm not opened minded enough, but I just don't believe the future is ARM on the desktop/server. I believe the future is x86 on the phone. I feel like it's less time until Intel gets the power correct as opposed to ARM getting the speed.

TillE• 13 years ago

Per Geekbench, an iPhone 5S / iPad Air is comparable to a MacBook Pro from 2009, and fully half as fast as some of the very latest laptops.

ARM is already extremely good for mobile applications. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but they certainly seem to be catching up faster than Intel has been able to cut down on power.

iyulaev2• 13 years ago

Bay Trail atom is already competitive with tablet-focused ARM. I've got a Samsung 500T that runs "real" windows. It weighs as much as an iPad and has ~10 hour run time, same as the iPad. The whole microarchitecture thing is less of an issue for power consumption and performance than most people think.

ptx2• 13 years ago

  > What is ARM?
  > An advanced RISC machine (ARM) server employs small,
  > low-power ARM processors, typically deployed as
  > systems on a chip (SoC) to reduce space, power consumption
  > and cost.

This looks like a perfect example of the kind of violation a trademark owner is required to pursue to protect the trademark: Dell uses "ARM server" here to mean "a server that is RISC-based and advanced" rather than "a server [based on tech] of the brand ARM from ARM Ltd."

wtracy4• 13 years ago

ARM stands for "Advanced RISC Machine". I believe the copy is correct, although I would have expected "advanced RISC machine" to be capitalized as "Advanced RISC Machine" as it refers to a proper name.

timthorn• 13 years ago

Indeed - although ARM officially no longer stands for anything according to the company.

ptx2• 13 years ago

That is exactly what I meant. The abbreviation that is the company name used to stand for "Advanced RISC Machines", but "an advanced RISC machine" is clearly a generic description of something that could come from any manufacturer.

As Wikipedia says[1]:

"A trademark which is popularly used to describe a product or service (rather than to distinguish the product or services from those of third parties) is sometimes known as a genericized trademark[2]. If such a mark becomes synonymous with that product or service to the extent that the trademark owner can no longer enforce its proprietary rights, the mark becomes generic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark

The point is that "ARM" as it is used in the text doesn't refer specifically to the products of the trademark owner. If such usage becomes acceptable, anyone could sell "ARM servers" and the trademark becomes useless.

ck2• 13 years ago

Are these really better per watt at serving content?

I'm all for x86/intel competition but I don't see this as real savings yet?

notacoward6• 13 years ago

Looks like they'd be a lot better per watt.

http://armservers.com/2012/06/18/apache-benchmarks-for-calxe...

This is hardly surprising to me. I worked on similar low-power high-density systems at SiCortex for a couple of years. High clock rates and big caches do improve performance, but they increase power consumption even more, so for a parallelizable workload a larger number of "wimpier" processors can do more work per watt.

mjg593• 13 years ago

Those figures are pretty close to being lies. A quad-core 3.3GHz Xeon that's only serving 6950 requests per second isn't going to be at anywhere near 100% utilisation, which means there's no way it's running at anywhere near its TDP. Same for the RAM. The x86 isn't going to be anywhere near 5W, but it's going to be significantly lower than 102W. They're also ignoring the fixed disk and PSU overheads, shifting the power side of the ratio in favour of the Calxeda, and using a benchmark that's going to end up network limited is a solid way of reducing the performance advantage of the Xeon.

I don't doubt that ARM does have a better power/performance ratio, but it's nowhere near 15x. Using such obviously misleading statistics leaves me suspecting it's way closer than that.

voidlogic4• 13 years ago

I think x86/amd64 virtualization has made ARM a much less compelling option for servers than what it would have been a few years ago.

I'm looking forward to benchmarks of new ARM server CPU (esp. AMDs), but in the past comparing scale out ARM boxes and tradtional servers in the same space has:

  1. Been much more more in favor x86/amd64 under low load (much lower latency for users)
  2. Been pretty similar under very high concurrent loads
  3. Not had compelling differentiation in power consumption

In short 48 1.6 GHz ARM cores doesn't farewell against even a lower end x86/amd64 server with dual quad core CPUs with SMT (hyperthreading), that is 32 logical cores at 3.0 GHz. And the x86/amd64 is much cheaper.

In reality I could fill a rack with these arm blades or have two quad socket x86/amd64 servers be equivalent or better...

I hope this changes for the sake of consumer options, but I need to see benchmarks + power usage stats to believe it.

lazyjones3• 13 years ago

In reality I could fill a rack with these arm blades or have two quad socket x86/amd64 servers be equivalent or better

Quad socket x86 is still prohibitively expensive, but in the price per performance assessment you might be right (at least if you do not consider the expensive high-end x86 CPUs). The ARM blades look interesting for bare metal clouds though.

wtracy4• 13 years ago

Quad socket x86 is still prohibitively expensive

Is there an engineering reason for this, or is there just not enough volume for those boards to be economical?

voidlogic4• 13 years ago

Quad socket x86 is still prohibitively expensive

Less expensive then a rack of these new ARM blades.

Still, lets take quad socket off the table, 4 2U dual socket x86/amd64 boxes still is a better value proposition.

Sssnake2• 13 years ago

Quad socket x86 is still prohibitively expensive

What? You can get a 1U, 4x16 core, 256GB server for ten grand. http://www.thinkmate.com/system/a+-server-1042g-tf

Sssnake2• 13 years ago

that is 32 logical cores at 3.0 GHz

Just having 32 logical cores doesn't mean much for performance. Hyperthreading is not magical, dual quad core cpus is still 8 cores, with potentially some minor performance gains from the hyperthreading depending on the application.

caw• 13 years ago

In my experience with HPC (i.e. 100% load on all cores), enabling Hyperthreading gives you higher job throughput at the cost of increasing the time to complete a single job. The throughput improvement is around 5-30% depending on the applications being run. The average I've seen is around 20.

voidlogic4• 13 years ago

In high-load but I/O bound tasks Hyperthreading (Intel market speak for SMT) is magic. If something is compute bound, you are correct and the benefit is often slim, but typically not for application or database servers.

hapless• 13 years ago

The new aarch64 chips will support large amounts of memory and hardware virtualization. Despite low performance, the perf/watt and high memory density might be good enough to compete with x86. These exist only as engineering samples and emulators right now.

All of the ARM server products in existence today are basically demos. Presumably the "select customers" offered HP "moonshot" and Dell "copper" are working on software ports and automation infrastructure for an aarch64 future.

kbuck• 13 years ago

To be fair, comparing core counts directly, each of those ARM processors is quadcore - so there are actually 192 physical cores in that 3U rack, not 48.

That said, I'm not convinced ARM is ready for server applications either. This might be interesting to hosting companies that want to sell low-end dedicated servers, though. (OVH already does something similar with Kimsufi, I believe?)

iSnow2• 13 years ago

I want to rent one of those as a cheap dedicated server. Get moving, hosters :)

imahboob• 13 years ago

ARM was meant to provide low cost servers, however with the prices of cloud servers coming down I am not sure how successful will these be.

iyulaev2• 13 years ago

"Hitting The Market" != "there is no general availability of the Dell "Copper" servers at this time."

kogir• 13 years ago

I'm honestly not interested in all the reasons you won't use these servers.

I doubt Dell designed these speculatively. One or more Dell customers likely requested them.

Who are these customers, and what is their use case? That's what's likely interesting.

wmf2• 13 years ago

But that's equally damning. Dell, SeaMicro, Viridis, and Moonshot combined have almost no microserver case studies after 1-2 years. At what point do we end the experiment?

theonewolf• 13 years ago

Look here for some ideas on workloads: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/

It will be interesting, I think around the 5 year mark, to see the industry case studies. Just because these projects were _announced_ does not mean they were in _heavy usage_ over the entire 1-2 year timeframe.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I suppose this is one of the things you can do when you take DELL private, no institutional shareholders to sue you because you 'threatened their value' with a radical product idea.

As a systems guy I love the concept, but I'm a bit sad at the implementation. I would have loved to see the back plane of these things connect to a 'switch module' and take the connectors off the front. Basically a 48 port GBE switch with quad 10GbE uplinks out the "end" of the case would have been much nicer. Installing a nice SDN stack in the switch hardware such that one could virtualize the switch topology on the fly and you've got a box that you can configure in lots of ways and still get some economies of scale in both the CPU and switch infrastructure. Install a 24 port 10GbE switch on the top of the rack, and you've to 6 "copper" (18U), 24 port switch (1U), for a rack with 288 hosts, 2.3T of RAM, 288T of storage, and assuming a non-blocking 24 port switch 1. 883Mbits between any two hosts. Add a 1U boot/config management server into the rack and that is a heck of a gizmo.

zebra• 13 years ago

This is is almost proof of concept technology. If it takes off I'm sure that DELL will invest a lot more R&D in it.

Copper enables the ARM server ecosystem

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