Dell announced it is responding to the demands of its customers for continued innovation in support of hyperscale environments, and enabling the ecosystem for ARM-based servers. The ARM-based server market is approaching an inflection point, marked by increasing customer interest in testing and developing applications, and Dell believes now is the right time to help foster development and testing of operating systems and applications for ARM servers.
Dell is recognised as an industry leader in both the x86 architecture and the hyperscale server market segments. Dell began testing ARM server technology internally in 2010 in response to increasing customer demands for density and power efficiency, and worked closely with select Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) hyperscale customers to understand their interest level and expectations for ARM-based servers. Today’s announcement is a natural extension of Dell’s server leadership and the company’s continued focus on delivering next generation technology innovation.
As part of this effort, Dell is enabling customers and partners to develop on ARM servers in three ways:
- Continuing delivery of the Dell “Copper” ARM server to select customers and partners.
- Delivering servers to key ecosystem partners such as Canonical and Cloudera, to support their development activities.
- Enabling continued software and ecosystem testing and development by providing remote-accessible Copper server clusters deployed in Dell Solution Centers, and through its deep partnership with Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
Customers have expressed great interest in understanding ARM-based server advantages and how they may apply to their hyperscale environments. Dell believes ARM infrastructures demonstrate promise for Web front-end and Hadoop environments, where advantages in performance per dollar and performance per watt are critical. The ARM server ecosystem is still developing, and largely available in open-source, non-production versions, and the current focus is on supporting development of that ecosystem. Dell has designed its programs to support today’s market realities by providing lightweight, high-performance seed units and easy remote access to development clusters.
The Dell “Copper” ARM server seed unit program will support software development and verification with a small number of customers worldwide ranging from the leaders in the hyperscale industry to smaller customers in focused web environments. At present, the Dell “Copper” ARM server is not generally available. Dell will continue to help enable ecosystem development, and bring ARM servers to general availability at the appropriate time.
Dell is working to enable software development for ARM-based server solutions, together with other leading industry partners such as Canonical and Cloudera. The partnership with these companies, and soon others in Dell’s Emerging Solutions Ecosystem, will help customers and the industry scope and test new applications.
Dell is staging clusters of the Dell “Copper” ARM server within the Dell Solution Centers and with TACC so developers may book time on the platforms. Dell also will deliver an ARM-supported version of Crowbar, Dell’s open-source management infrastructure software, to the industry in the future.
