Category Archives: Power8

ARM, Cavium, Infrastructure as a Service, Miroslaw Klaba, News & Analysis, OVH, Power8, Vendor

OVH adds ARM to public cloud

OVH has launched an ARM-based public cloud service just 8 months after going to market with a Power8-based cloud platform

OVH has launched an ARM-based public cloud service just 8 months after going to market with a Power8-based cloud platform

French cloud and hosting provider OVH said this week it will add Cavium ARM-based processors to its public cloud platform by the end of next month. The move comes just 8 months after the company added the Power8 architecture to its cloud arsenal.

The company said it will add Cavium’s flagship 48 core 64-bit ARMv8-A ThunderX workload-optimized processor to its RunAbove public cloud service cloud service.

“This deployment is an example of OVH.Com’s leadership in delivering latest industry leading technologies to our customers,” said Miroslaw Klaba, vice president of research & development at OVH.

“With RunAbove ThunderX based instances, we can offer our users breakthrough performance at the lowest cost while optimizing the infrastructure for targeted compute and storage workloads delivering best in class TCO and user experience.”

OVH, which serves 700,000 customers from 17 datacentres globally, said it wanted to offer a more diversified technology stack and cater to growing demand for cloud-based high performance compute workloads, and drop the cost per VM.

“Cloud service operators are looking to gain the benefits and flexibility of end to end virtualization while managing dynamically changing workloads and massive data requirements,” said Rishi Chugh, director marketing at Cavium. “ ThunderX based RunAbove instances provide exceptional processing performance and flexibility by integrating a tremendous amount of  IO along with targeted workload accelerators for compute, security, networking and storage at the lowest cost per VM for RunAbove – into a power, space and cost-optimized form factor.”

OVH is among just a handful of cloud service providers offering a variety of cloud compute platforms beyond x86. Late last year the company launched a cloud service based on IBM’s Power8 processor architecture, an open source architecture tailored specifically for big data applications, and OpenStack.

But while cloud compute is becoming more heterogeneous there are still far fewer workloads being created natively for ARM and Power8, which are both quite young, than x86, so it will likely take some time for asset utilisation (and the TCO) rates to catch up with where x86 servers are today.

Corey Bell, Datacentre, IBM, Ken King, News & Analysis, Open Compute, OpenPower, OpenStack, Power8, Vendor

OpenPower members reveal open source cloud tech mashups

OpenPower members have been busy creating open source server specs based on the Power8 architecture

OpenPower members have been busy creating open source server specs based on the Power8 architecture

OpenPower Foundation members pulled the curtain back on a number of open source cloud datacentre technologies including the first commercially available OpenPower-based server, and the first open server spec that combines OpenStack, Open Compute and OpenPower architectures.

Members of the open source hardware community, which IBM – the community’s founding organisation – said now numbers over 110 organisations, revealed a number of joint hardware initiatives falling under the OpenPower umbrella.

The Foundation announced the first OpenPower-based servers, developed by Chinese ODM Tyan (TYAN TN71-BP012), a variant of those IBM recently said it would add to its SoftLayer datacentres. The servers will be commercially available in the second half of 2015.

IBM and Wistron also revealed an OpenPower-based server using GPU and networking technology from Nvidia and Mellanox, respectively, which is being aimed at high performance compute workloads.

The foundation also announced the first server spec and motherboard mock-up combining the design concepts of the Facebook-led open source hardware project, Open Compute, with OpenStack and OpenPower technologies, an initiative Rackspace – among other service providers with a vested interest all three open source projects – was keen to bring to fruition.

“Collaborating across our open development communities will accelerate and broaden the raw potential of a fully open datacentre. We have a running start together and look forward to technical collaboration and events to engage our broader community,” said Corey Bell, chief executive officer of the Open Compute Project.

In an interview with BCN earlier this month Brad McCredie, IBM fellow and vice president of IBM Power Systems Development and president of the OpenPower Foundation said there is a big opportunity for Power to succeed in the market, and that IBM hopes to claim up to 30 per cent of the scale-out market in a matter of years.

Ken King, general manager OpenPower Alliances at IBM said: “OpenPower started off as an idea that immediately resonated with our technology partners to strengthen their scale out implementations like analytics.  Now, OpenPower is fundamental to every conversation IBM is having with clients — from HPC to scale out computing to cloud service providers.  Choice, freedom and better performance are strategic imperatives guiding customers around the globe, and OpenPOWER is leading the way.