ARM and x86 for portable devices and clouds (1)

New data center services for mobile platforms have increased demand for micro servers. the demand increase is triple in 2013 and according to research firm IHS iSuppli; the demand is going to increase in next five years.

For server design, maintenance, expandability, energy efficiency and low cost are important factors. Although Intel unveiled and reference the micro server concep, ARM architecture is gaining greater support from software and OS vendors which could put pressure on Intel.

Data centers spend 50% of the cost on power which can be reduced by using ARM architecture. ARM chips consume dramatically low power than x86 chips.ARM architectures are good for cloud computing in terms of following points. One is Scale-out workloads. Because of capability of ARM doing parallel processing very well, it is good match for large loads of data analytics, webscale applications and web search.other point is low power consumption and low cost.

The ARM architecture may face Jevon’s paradox which states that the resources increasing efficiency tends to increase the rate of consumption of that resource (rather than reducing the use).
The problems with ARM architecture: They support 32 bit instruction sets and most server operating softwares and applications use 64 bit architectures. Even if ARM servers are used in future, many applications would have to be rewritten for ARM architecture.
Also, data center buyers will have to get used to ARM technologies. Moreover they need to support multiple architectures to support their data centes.

TryStack is an OpenStack Essex on ARM sandbox is the only one available now. TryStack resembles the cloud environment which can be created by using OpenStack software. It allows testing of reference architectures. If we want to check how software running on ARM server against Xeon(Intel) server,TryStack is a sandbox for developers to play with.

The “ARM Zone” in TryStack is hosted by Core NAP. Core NAP is a service provider in Austin,TX. HP is contributing Redstone servers, Calxeda giving the server node cards, and Canonical is providing Ubuntu server 12.04 Linux to make ARM Zone. This hardware includes 25 server nodes with 24 disks. Also, 24 node-24 disk capacity of standby.