I'm looking to start a small operation later this year based around ARM-based servers. This is a pretty new area, and may well always be niche but that's fine by me.

Essentially my plan is to provide an easy and affordable platform for those interested to start to work with ARM - testing their frameworks, DBs, CMSs etc.

I have easy access to a nice colo site which bills purely on per-server-setup+power usage, so my outgoings should be low. Hence my hosting charges can be too - while allowing some profit to plow back in.

So, anyone here:

* Keen to get access to a hosted ARM-based system?
* Looking at the options to provide these?

ARM based servers are fine for a low end setup and dev/testing. Personally, I won't go for ARM-based servers as the performance is just not acceptable(last time when I tried, it was a horrible experience).

Interesting idea. It more attractive when Nvidia's ARM-based server CPUs (http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/01/project-denver-processor-to-usher-in-new-era-of-computing/) are released but at that point it will simply be no different to commodity hosting with a different CPU class; otherwise for the current market/mindset i.e. portable/embedded services and devices I don't quite see the benefits rather (from a customer perspective) as compared to working directly with simulators or local development kits.

To me there are a couple of angles: (1) ARM-based servers are going to much cheaper to run, and (2) much "greener", but (c) they need the whole software stack to be compiled for ARM. Core LAMP is probably fine, but nginx?, etc etc.

On the Nvidia angle, I'm not too interested - GPU's for computing are way out of my comfort zone, and I don't see the relevance for graphics in a server.

I could imagine a very low budget service, where a bunch of these cheap ARM boards like beagleboard or sheva plug or IGEP are crammed into some 1U casing.

Power usage wise they are very efficient, no fans needed for cooling so they use <5W, drop in maybe a 64G SD card, and they provide an OK performance for small personal stuff like VPN, irc?, and some websites...


(Also, getting Quake 2 to run on a 200mhz ARM with 16 megs of RAM is quite a thrill ;))

I developed ARM-based system for over one year. Actually I use ARM11/v6 running at 800MHz/1GHz with very low power consumption, main cpu only need 400mA.
Most of my customers came to me just because they want to switch from Industry PC to ARMSoC for saving the eBOM cost from USD$300 to under $100.

Consider the CPU power and the accompanying components in such a cheap design, you can't expect too much workloads on the system.

I'm looking to start a small operation later this year based around ARM-based servers. This is a pretty new area, and may well always be niche but that's fine by me.

Essentially my plan is to provide an easy and affordable platform for those interested to start to work with ARM - testing their frameworks, DBs, CMSs etc.


So are you going ahead with this plan?

Well, Online.net seem to be running one of those ultra-high-density Dell racks with several hundred mini-dedis using VIA Nano processors.
They've been doing it for a while, so the market is most definitely available.
If you look it up, I'm sure you'll get a better idea of their infrastructure.

In terms of interest, I sure would! It would definitely be interesting to use and would arguably more geeky than tinkering with an Arduino. :)

Best of luck for the future :)

In case anyone hasn't heard about this:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/02/hp-and-calxedas-moonshot-arm-servers-will-bring-all-the-boys-to/

We are developing ARM based solution for hosting applications. Honestly talking this is not so easy. There is a lot of issues.

First of all, ARM up to Cortex-A9 support maximum 4GB of RAM. But this is linear space without bug like in x86. Cortex-A15 (what is particular not available now) support 40-bit addressing but for each process still edge of 4GB.
Second, ARM up to Cortex-A9 don`t support virtualization so can be selled like dedicated or shared hosting only.
Third, ARM don`t support 64-bit up to ARMv8 what was only announced few days ago and real devices expected for 2014.
Fourth, most of open sourced code already ported onto ARM but will you do with proprietary software?
Fifth, in-system interconnect in our system will be limited to 1G per blade.

Thats all! If you have questions - welcome!

Look this about OpenVZ on ARM -> http://openvz.livejournal.com/24651.html