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HP Launches Their Low-Power Moonshot Servers

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  • #11
    @vim_user and smitty

    Those ideas did cross my mind, but I guess it comes down to how much more cost effective ARM is compared to using a retired high-workload server or just simply a low-end AMD server.

    As another quick question - do any of the 64 bit ARM systems allow replaceable memory, or is it all SoC? I could see a use for ARM in a server market if the 64 bit models allow regular DDR3 DIMMs or SO-DIMMs - sometimes tasks are very memory demanding but not so CPU demanding. I suppose ARM would also be handy if it were used as a central backup system, assuming some of the server models have bundles of SATA/SAS ports.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by schmidtbag View Post
      Those ideas did cross my mind, but I guess it comes down to how much more cost effective ARM is compared to using a retired high-workload server or just simply a low-end AMD server.
      Major costs in running a server nowadays are not the price of the hardware, but the price for the electricity needed to run it and the energy needed to cool the systems and low power ARM systems are almost unbeatable here for workloads that don't cope well with few heavy x86 cores.

      As another quick question - do any of the 64 bit ARM systems allow replaceable memory, or is it all SoC? I could see a use for ARM in a server market if the 64 bit models allow regular DDR3 DIMMs or SO-DIMMs - sometimes tasks are very memory demanding but not so CPU demanding. I suppose ARM would also be handy if it were used as a central backup system, assuming some of the server models have bundles of SATA/SAS ports.
      As you can see in this article, especially the picture of the machine, it seems that those machines use standard RAM and have at least on implementation as storage server:
      Gopi also unveiled three server reference designs that AppliedMicro has come up with, to show server makers what they can build. They?re dubbed X-Memory, X-Compute and X-Storage, depending on the target application.

      The X-Storage system is aimed at Hadoop-type analytics applications, and combines a sea of hard disks with a single X-Gene server board. It had a total 36TB of storage, Gopi said.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by Vim_User View Post
        Major costs in running a server nowadays are not the price of the hardware, but the price for the electricity needed to run it and the energy needed to cool the systems and low power ARM systems are almost unbeatable here for workloads that don't cope well with few heavy x86 cores.
        It's not just the price of the energy directly - most data centers are limited by the amount of power they can supply internally, which means increasing the power efficiency let's you stick a lot more servers in 1 location.

        Running 1 data center is a lot, lot cheaper than running 2 completely separate ones.

        None of this particularly matters for your average company that just runs a dozen servers to power everything. It's the major data centers that have thousands upon thousands that are interested in these types of systems.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by smitty3268 View Post
          It's not just the price of the energy directly - most data centers are limited by the amount of power they can supply internally, which means increasing the power efficiency let's you stick a lot more servers in 1 location.

          Running 1 data center is a lot, lot cheaper than running 2 completely separate ones.

          None of this particularly matters for your average company that just runs a dozen servers to power everything. It's the major data centers that have thousands upon thousands that are interested in these types of systems.
          That said, it would be fun if were possible to buy a tiny consumer version of that backplane box - scaling it down to e.g. four slots should limit the amount of switching hardware and such to a more manageable price, and the blades themselves ought to be fairly cheap. Not going to happen, but it would have been neat.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by dnebdal View Post
            That said, it would be fun if were possible to buy a tiny consumer version of that backplane box - scaling it down to e.g. four slots should limit the amount of switching hardware and such to a more manageable price, and the blades themselves ought to be fairly cheap. Not going to happen, but it would have been neat.
            I would like to have one of these in even smaller versions, with one or two of those SoCs, should be a powerful but cheap and energy-efficient home-server and maybe even fanless. Would be a nice improvement to my Atom home-server.

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            • #16
              Originally posted by Vim_User View Post
              I would like to have one of these in even smaller versions, with one or two of those SoCs, should be a powerful but cheap and energy-efficient home-server and maybe even fanless. Would be a nice improvement to my Atom home-server.
              On the other hand, that would also compete with a bunch of other tiny computers, like the RPi, the faster ARM SoCs, ALIX3 (AMD Geode LX 800MHz, I believe), and even mITX (a 35W TDP dualcore i3 would roundly wipe the floor with any atom, idle around 1W, and manage fine with passive cooling).

              A blade + single-chassis solution would probably be really solid and have good fast connectivity, though. Hmm.
              Last edited by dnebdal; 10 April 2013, 12:10 PM.

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              • #17
                Originally posted by dnebdal View Post
                On the other hand, that would also compete with a bunch of other tiny computers, like the RPi, the faster ARM SoCs, ALIX3 (AMD Geode LX 800MHz, I believe), and even mITX (a 35W TDP dualcore i3 would roundly wipe the floor with any atom, idle around 1W, and manage fine with passive cooling).

                A blade + single-chassis solution would probably be really solid and have good fast connectivity, though. Hmm.
                I wouldn't consider the RPi or one of the ALIX boards for a home-server due to the lack of SATA ports (a problem with most of the current SoCs, I would think). An i3 mITX would be fine and of course faster than an Atom, but always to use x86 is a bit boring, I would go for an ARM, a MIPS or maybe even a PowerPC CPU just for the fun of it.

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