TechieGroups

ARM based servers hold the promise of extremely low power and excellent performance per Watt ratios. It's possible to place an incredible amount of servers into a single rack—there are already implementations with as many as 1000 ARM servers in one rack (48 server nodes in a 2U chassis). And all of those nodes consume less than 5KW (or around 5W per quad-core ARM node).

But whenever a new technology is hyped, it is good to remain skeptical. The media hypes and raves about new trends because people love to read about something new, but at the end of the day, the system administrator has to keep his IT services working and convince his boss to invest in new technologies.

Hundreds of opinion pages have been and will be written about the ARM vs. x86 server war, but nothing can beat a test run with real world benchmarks, and that is what we'll look at today. We have put some heavy loads on our Boston Viridis cluster system running 24 web sites—among other applications—and measured throughput, response times, and power. We'll be comparing it with the lower power Xeons to see how the current ARM servers compare to the best Intel Xeon offerings. Performance per Watt, Performance per dollar, whatever your metric is, we have the hard numbers.

We've been quietly testing doing more video content on the site over the past year. I've done a few reviews over at our YouTube channel, and we also host all of our smartphone/tablet camera samples over there as well. Going into 2013 we'll be ramping up the amount of video content on the site to go along with Pipeline and the Podcast as some the new features we've introduced over the past couple of years. In doing so we're also going to be hosting videos locally.

When we were looking for the first content to trial our locally served video, I asked Johan de Gelas, the head of our IT/Enterprise testing at AnandTech if he could put something together. Johan came back with a behind the scenes look at the Sizing Servers Lab in Belgium, the back-end for all of our server reviews and testing. 

Johan's video is embedded below and if this goes well he's promised to bring us a look at ARM based servers on video in the not too distant future.

MAKER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP announced a .9bn loss for its fourth quarter as revenues and operating margins fell while a write-down of .8bn on its acquisition of Autonomy put paid to any hopes of posting a profit.

HP’s painful 2012 continued with the firm racking up a huge loss as sales in just about every division declined while operating margins fell sharply. This resulted in the firm reporting a .9bn loss on revenues of bn, seven percent down from the same quarter last year.

Not only is HP’s .9bn quarterly loss shocking but dissecting it reveals a company in trouble. After the firm posted a bn write-down on its EDS purchase, it has had to wipe .8bn off its purchase of Autonomy due to “accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures”.

HP effectively said that Autonomy’s board had inflated the value of the firm, a firm HP paid bn to buy. HP issued a statement saying, “HP is extremely disappointed to find that some former members of Autonomy’s management team used accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company, prior to Autonomy’s acquisition by HP. These efforts appear to have been a willful effort to mislead investors and potential buyers, and severely impacted HP management’s ability to fairly value Autonomy at the time of the deal. We remain 100 percent committed to Autonomy and its industry-leading technology.”

Aside from HP’s write-down of Autonomy, things weren’t much better for the firm. HP reported that revenue in its PC division fell by 14 percent from the fourth quarter last year, while its printing division revenue fell by five percent. Revenue in the firm’s enterprise division, which includes server and networking equipment, fell by nine percent, while its services division revenue fell by six percent.

Only HP’s software division, which includes the once over-valued Autonomy, showed any sign of life, posting a 14 percent increase in revenue, while the firm’s financial services arm, which funds HP customers’ investments to buy HP products and services, saw a nominal one percent increase in revenue. All in all, the firm’s hardware divisions performed very badly, and sales at Autonomy could only go so far to turn the red ink to black in its software division.

HP CEO Meg Whitman avoided any mention of the steep loss and declines in revenue almost across the board by saying, “We’re starting to see progress in key areas, such as new product releases and customer wins. We’re particularly pleased that in Q4, we were able to improve our balance sheet, generating .1 billion in operating cash flow, and we returned 4 million to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and dividends.”

Whitman has already scratched 2013 and HP’s stock price hit a 10-year low on Friday. While Whitman has been given time to clean up the mess left by former CEO Leo Apotheker, she and the board must hope that things won’t get much worse before they start to get better. µ

HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING VENDOR Cray has bought server outfit Appro for m.

Back in April Cray sold its interconnect business to Intel and now the firm has gone on to spend some of that cash by buying server and high performance computing (HPC) vendor Appro. Cray announced that it paid m for Appro with .5m of that as working capital.

As part of Cray’s purchase, Appro CEO Deniel Kim will become head of Cray’s Cluster Solutions business that will flog Appro kit under Cray’s brand. Cray will also absorb 90 Appro employees.

Cray CEO and president Peter Ungaro said, “Cray has always been a company with a singular focus on the high performance computing market, and with this acquisition, we have strengthened that commitment and will now be positioned to expand our portfolio of highly innovative supercomputing solutions. Appro is one of the market leaders in HPC cluster solutions, and this acquisition is another step forward as we continue to transform Cray into a company that provides world-class offerings to customers across all segments of the supercomputing market, including Big Data. I look forward to welcoming all our new Cray colleagues in this exciting moment for our company – positioning us well for accelerated growth into the future.”

While Appro might not be held in the same high regard as Cray in the HPC market, it is still the third most popular HPC vendor in the soon to be updated Top 500 list. Cray on the other hand has taken the top spot in the latest Top 500 list with the Titan cluster and recently launched its next generation XC30 cluster codenamed Cascade.

Appro’s product range includes HPC and standard servers, and offers Cray a presence in the server market that is becoming increasingly reliance on interconnect for overall system performance, a crucial performance factor in HPC for decades. That Cray managed to snap up Appro for m including working capital but no debt seems something of a bargain.

Cray said that it expects the deal to close within a matter of days or weeks. µ

CEO OF ARM Warren East has talked up the firm’s technology as key for solving the rising costs associated with running server farms.

Speaking at the IP Expo event in London on Wednesday attended by The INQUIRER, East used his opening keynote session to discuss the firm’s aims in the server market.

He said ARM believes that improving efficiency and reducing energy consumption of servers is vital to the future technology landscape, as the number of servers in use rises to meet the demands of consumers and enterprises.

“We are seeing server volumes growing significantly. Studies suggest that for every 600 smartphones in use a server is created, and the number of smartphones in use rose by a third last year, so there’s huge amounts of electricity being used by servers,” he said.

“That means huge increases in the amount of emissions produced by the energy needed to drive this. And the costs for datacentre operators are going to increase hugely. In fact already ICT in its entirety uses about 10 percent of the electricity that we generate on this planet.”

East said that as this demand for data on servers continues to increase, it is not feasible to imagine that companies can just build ever-bigger datacentres and buy more servers. Instead, new servers that are more efficient are required, he added.

“So in 2008 we looked at this opportunity and decided that in theory we could reduce the amount of energy consumed by servers, as a third of the energy used in servers is on the processing side, getting data in and out of the microprocessors,” he explained.

“So by reducing the power of the microprocessor itself you can save a lot of energy use in the CPU, we think we could save two-thirds of the energy consumed.”

SAN FRANCISCO: SERVER VENDOR Seamicro has launched its SM15000 server that uses AMD’s Piledriver processors.

Seamicro, which AMD bought primarily for its interconnect fabric, has launched its first server under AMD’s ownership, the SM15000. The firm said the SM15000 server will have compute cards that use AMD Piledriver Opteron and Intel Ivy Bridge processors.

Seamicro revealed that the SM15000 has up to 64 compute card slots and supports 5PB of storage using 1,408 hard drives or solid state drives. The firm, despite its ties to AMD, spent most of the presentation talking up the storage capability of the tragically named Freedom Fabric.

According to Andrew Feldman, general manager of AMD’s Datacenter Server Solutions and previous CEO of Seamicro, the company’s storage fabric uses I/O virtualisation that offers “the benefits of the SAN at a fraction of the price”. He talked up its performance and price reduction for virtualised environments.

Feldman said the firm offers compute cards with an eight-core Piledriver Opteron, which he claimed is the first single processor node that can access 64GB of RAM. Seamicro has also introduced a compute card with an Intel quad-core Ivy Bridge E3-1265L v2 processor running at 2.5GHz or 3.1GHz boosted that supports up to 32GB of RAM.

Feldman said Seamicro is in discussions with OEMs to license the storage fabric. Feldman also said that AMD’s Brazos processors did not provide the performance required for the workloads the SM15000 servers are expected to face.

Seamicro has had a relatively easy ride until now because it was up against other x86 server vendors. However the firm will soon start to face competition from ARM server vendors that can boast similar or greater processor density.

Feldman said both AMD and Intel based SM15000 server systems will be available in November with prices starting at 9,000 for a 64 eight-core Opteron processors model. µ

THE SUIT WEARING US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has seized an anonymising email server to find out who sent a bomb threat.

The FBI seized the server on Wednesday, said co-location hosting firm Riseup Networks and May First/People Link, an organisation that offers technology services for counterculture groups. In a blog post they said that the server operated by the European Counter Network (ECN) that provided an anonymous remailer service called Mixmaster was taken because it might provide evidence about bomb threats. However, they added that it will not contain any useful information or evidence.

“The company running the facility has confirmed that the server was removed in conjunction with a search warrant issued at the request of the FBI,” said May First/People Link director Jamie McClelland. “The server seizure is not only an attack against us, but an attack against all users of the Internet who depend on anonymous communication.”

McClelland said that many users are affected by the loss of the server, including academics, artists, historians, feminist groups, gay rights groups, community centers, documentation and software archives and free speech groups, as well as a number of mailing lists.

Three hundred email accounts, between 50-80 email lists, and a collection of web sites have been taken down thanks to the seizure. None of them are likely to be of any use to investigators because of their anonymising nature.

“The FBI is using a sledgehammer approach, shutting down service to hundreds of users due to the actions of one anonymous person,” said Devin Theriot-Orr, a spokesperson for Riseup.

“This is particularly misguided because there is unlikely to be any information on the server regarding the source of the threatening emails. Taking this server won’t stop these bomb threats. The only effect it has is to also disrupt e-mail and websites for thousands of unrelated people.” µ

The Sandy Bridge based Xeon E5-2600 processors were launched by Intel yesterday, and Supermicro wasn't far behind in launching a host of solutions supporting / based on these processors. The new generation X9 Xeon E5 family based platforms offer a number of improved features over previous offerings from Supermicro, including but not limited to:

Support for upto 768 GB of DDR3-1600 MHz memory in 24 DIMM slots

SATA 3.0 and SAS 2.0 (6 Gbps) support

ConnectX FDR/QDR InfiniBand ports

Dual 10 GbE Ethernet / Quad Ethernet LAN

PCI-E 3.0

LSI 2008 (Software RAID) and LSI 2108 (Hardware RAID) controllers

More than 100 product platforms have been updated / newly created by Supermicro for the new Xeon E5 processor family.

Supermicro's X9 solutions can be broadly divided into the following categories:

Supermicro Servers

Supermicro Serverboards

Supermicro SuperBlade

The servers are built around the boards in the second category, and just build upon the existing chassis / PSU combinations. The SuperBlade configurations and some of the serverboards in the X9 generation have only been announced on paper.

The table below summarizes the specifications of Supermicro's single socket LGA2011 serverboards which are currently available.

Supermicro X9 Single Socket LGA2011 Serverboards

Model Number

Form Factor

DRAM

Chipset

PCI-E Configuration

LAN

Storage

USB

Misc. Notes

X9SRA

ATX

8 DIMMs (256 GB)

Intel C602

2 x16 PCI-E 3.0, 1 x4 PCI-E 3.0 (in x8), 1 x4 PCI-E 2.0 (in x8), 1 PCI 32-bit

Intel i350 Dual GbE

2x SATA3, 4x SATA2, 4x SATA (RAID 0,1,5,10)

14x v2.0 (8 rear + 6 headers), 4x v3.0 (2 rear + 2 headers)

 

X9SRi / X9SRi-F

ATX

8 DIMMs (256 GB)

Intel C602

1 x16 PCI-E 3.0, 1 x8 PCI-E 3.0 (in x16), 1 x4 PCI-E 2.0 (in x16)

Intel i350 Dual GbE

2x SATA3, 4x SATA2, 4x SATA (RAID 0,1,5,10)

9x v2.0 (2 rear + 6 headers + 1 Type-A)

IPMI 2.0 and KVM with Dedicated LAN ("F")

X9SRE / S9SRE-F

ATX

8 DIMMs (256 GB)

Intel C602

1 x16 PCI-E 3.0, 1 x8 PCI-E 3.0 (in x16), 1 x4 PCI-E 2.0 (in x16), 3 PCI-X 64-bit

Intel i350 Dual GbE ("F")

2x SATA3, 4x SATA2, 4x SATA (RAID 0,1,5,10)

9x v2.0 (2 rear + 6 headers + 1 Type-A)

IPMI 2.0 and KVM with Dedicated LAN

X9SRG-F

Custom (7.71" x 16.64")

8 DIMMs (256 GB)

Intel C602

2 x16 PCI-E 3.0, 1 x8 PCI-E 3.0

Intel i350 Dual GbE

2x SATA3, 4x SATA2 (RAID 0,1,5,10), 4x SAS2 (RAID 0,1,10)

6x v2.0 (2 rear + 4 headers)

 

X9SRW-F / X9SRW-3F

Custom (8.15" x 13.05")

8 DIMMs (256 GB)

Intel C602 ("F"), Intel C606 ("3F")

2 x16 PCI-E 3.0, 1 x8 PCI-E 3.0

Intel i350 Dual GbE

2x SATA3, 4x SATA2 (RAID 0,1,5,10), 4x SATA

8x v2.0 (2 rear + 6 headers)

4x SATA extra ("3F")

The table below summarizes the specifications of Supermicro's dual socket LGA2011 serverboards which are currently available.

Supermicro X9 Dual Socket LGA2011 Serverboards

Model Number

Form Factor

DRAM

Chipset

PCI-E Configuration

LAN

Storage

USB

Misc. Notes

X9DAi

E-ATX

16 DIMMs (512 GB)

Intel C602

3 x16 PCI-E 3.0, 2 x8 PCI-E 3.0, 1 x4 PCI-E 3.0 (in x8)

Intel i350 Dual GbE

2x SATA3, 8x SATA2

7x v2.0, 4x v3.0

2x 1394a headers + Realtek ALC889 7.1 HD 8 Channel Audio w/ SPDIF header

X9DR3-F / X9DRi-F

E-ATX

16 DIMMs (512 GB)

Intel C602 ("i"), Intel C606 ("3-F")

3 x16 PCI-E 3.0, 3 x8 PCI-E 3.0

Intel i350 Dual GbE

2x SATA3, 4x SATA2, 4x SATA2 extra ("i"), 8x SAS (RAID 0,1,10) ("3-F")

11x v2.0 (4 rear + 6 headers + 1 Type-A)

IPMI 2.0 and KVM with Dedicated LAN

X9DR3- LN4F+ / X9DRi- LN4F+

EE-ATX (13.68" x 13")

24 DIMMs (768 GB)

Intel C602 ("i"), Intel C606 ("3")

4 x16 PCI-E 3.0, 1 x8 PCI-E 3.0, 1 x4 PCI-E (in x8)

Intel i350 Dual GbE

2x SATA3, 4x SATA2, 4x SATA2 extra ("i"), 8x SAS (RAID 0,1,10) ("3")

9x v2.0 (4 rear + 4 headers + 1 Type-A)

IPMI 2.0 and KVM with Dedicated LAN

X9DRL-3F / X9DRL- iF

ATX

8 DIMMs (256 GB)

Intel C602 ("i"), Intel C606 ("3")

2 x8 PCI-E 3.0, 1 x8 PCI-E 3.0 (in x16), 1 x4 PCI-E 2.0 (in x8), 1 x1 PCI-E 2.0, 1 PCI

Intel 82574L GbE LAN
with Dual GbE Ports

2x SATA3, 4x SATA2, 4x SATA2 extra ("i"), 8x SAS (RAID 0,1,10) ("3")

9x v2.0 (4 rear + 4 headers + 1 Type-A)

IPMI 2.0 and KVM with Dedicated LAN

X9DRT-H F / IBQF / IBFF

Custom (6.8" x 16.64")

8 DIMMs (256 GB)

Intel C602

1 x24 PCI-E 3.0 and
special x8 connector for SMC add-on

Intel i350 Dual GbE

2x SATA3, 5x SATA2

4x v2.0 (2 rear + 2 header)

Infiniband QDR (40 Gbps / "QF")
Infiniband FDR (56 Gbps / "FF")
IPMI 2.0 and KVM with Dedicated LAN

X9DRW-3F / X9DRW-iF

E-ATX

16 DIMMs (512 GB)

Intel C602 ("i"), Intel C606 ("3")

1 x32 PCI-E 3.0

Intel i350 Dual GbE

2x SATA3, 4x SATA2, 4x SATA2 extra ("i"), 8x SAS (RAID 0,1,10) ("3")

8x v2.0 (4 rear + 4 header)

IPMI 2.0 and KVM with Dedicated LAN

X9DRG- HF / X9DRG- HTF

Custom (7.71" x 16.64")

8 DIMMs (256 GB)

Intel C602

4 x16 PCI-E 3.0, 1 x8 PCI-E 3.0 (in x16), 1 x4 PCI-E 2.0 (in x16)

Intel i350 Dual GbE ("HF")
Intel X540 Dual 10Gb Base-T LAN ("HTF")

2x SATA3, 8x SATA2

6x v2.0 (2 rear + 4 header)

IPMI 2.0 and KVM with Dedicated LAN

X9DRD-iF

E-ATX

8 DIMMs (256 GB)

Intel C602

1 x16 PCI-E 3.0, 4 x8 PCI-E 3.0

Intel i350 Dual GbE

2x SATA3, 4x SATA2

7x v2.0 (4 rear + 2 headers + 1 Type-A)

IPMI 2.0 and KVM with Dedicated LAN

If you want to take a look at the systems based on these boards / upcoming boards, head on over to Supermicro's X9 page. It must also be noted that Supermicro supplies a number of integrated solutions for workstations, storage and data centers, and all of these have been updated with support for the new Xeon E5 processor family.

CHIP DESIGNER AMD is buying low power server vendor Seamicro in a bid to shore up its business and take a lead in the cloud market.

AMD is buying the microserver firm for 4m, of which it will pay 1m in cash. Much of the talk is about the cloud, and AMD said that it will use Seamicro to push deeper into cloud-based web content markets like social networking, search and video.

AMD expects that its first Opteron processor releases that feature in Seamicro systems will be out later this year. It added that Seamicro will continue with its tradtional server business.

“By acquiring Seamicro, we are accelerating AMD’s transformation into an agile, disruptive innovator capable of staking a data center leadership position,” said Rory Read, president and CEO of AMD.

“Seamicro is a pioneer in low-power server technology. The unmatched combination of AMD’s processing capabilities, Seamicro’s system and fabric technology, and our ambidextrous technology approach uniquely positions AMD with a compelling, differentiated position to attack the fastest growing segment of the server market.” µ

Facebook had 22 Million active users in the middle of 2007; fast forward to 2011 and the site now has 800 Million active users, with 400 million of them logging in every day. Facebook has grown exponentially, to say the least! To cope with this kind of exceptional growth and at the same time offer a reliable and cost effective service requires out of the box thinking. Through a combination of software optimizations and a careful selection of hardware, Facebook set out to create a platform that would meet their needs, and then they open sourced the design to the world.

The Facebook Open Compute server design was ambitious: “The result is a data center full of vanity free servers that is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art data centers.” Even better is that Facebook Engineering sent a couple Open Compute servers to our lab for testing:

As a competing solution we have an HP DL380 G7 in the lab. Recall from our last server clash that the HP DL380 G7 was one of the most power efficient servers of 2010. Is a server "targeted at the cloud" and designed by Facebook engineering able to beat one of the best and most popular general purpose servers? That is the question we'll answer in this article.