Manchester-based cloud services provider DataCentred has added ARM AArch64-based servers to its OpenStack-based public cloud platform, a product of its recently announced partnership with Codethink. The company’s head of cloud services told BCN the company is responding to customer demand for putting ARM-based workloads in the cloud.

As part of the move the ARM AArch64 architecture, which allows 32-bit and 64-bit processes to be executed alongside one another, will be added to the company’s OpenStack-based public cloud offering; the company said it will run the platform on HP M400 ARM hardware, and give customers access to Intel and ARM architectures alongside one another within an OpenStack environment.

DataCentrerd said the move will help drive down the cost of data centre operation and of the cost of virtualised instances within a customer’s service framework.

“We are thrilled to be the first OpenStack public cloud operator to feature 64-bit ARM instances. This breakthrough is testament to the considerable skill and expertise of our OpenStack cloud development team.  This is probably the first example of Moonshot AArch64 running in Europe outside of HP’s development labs, and certainly the first example of generally available Moonshot backed AArch64 instances in an OpenStack public cloud anywhere in the world,” said Mike Kelly, chief executive and founder of DataCentred.

“We know that ARM themselves are pleased to hear of this development, as a real world deployment. OpenStack is one of the big success stories for Open Source software, and is likely to be the environment through which enterprise migrates, in a vendor neutral way, to take advantage of elastic cloud compute,” Kelly added.

Matt Jarvis, head of cloud computing at DataCentred told BCN there’s currently a scarcity of ARM in the cloud.

“This deployment is driven by customer demand – we have both new customers who want to access ARM64 on-demand, and existing customers who we’ve been talking to about proof of concept ARM workloads for some time,” Jarvis said.

“There is significant interest from the worldwide community of technology companies currently working with ARM hardware to have access to develop platforms on-demand, along with specific vertical market interest in ARM as part of a longer term technical strategy targeting reduction in operating cost due to power savings,” he added.

ARM for compute seems to be fairly scarce in the cloud world, though it’s clear that OpenStack incumbents are looking to bring the software platform to all kinds of architecture beyond x86. Oracle is looking to marry SPARC and OpenStack while IBM and Rackspace are both working towards getting the open source software platform working on OpenPower.

DataCentred said it plans to move the Moonshot-powered cloud service into production sometime later this year.