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.