#calxeda

Отчеты по новым сотрудникам Amazon показывают, что гигант розничной торговли нанимает инженеров Calxeda. Компания Amazon наняла несколько инженеров, которые раньше работали на Calxeda, и разместила несколько вакансий на своем сайте. Переход бывших инженеров Calxeda в компанию Amazon может оз ... http://www.scitech-news.ru/2014/04/amazon-nachnet-vypuskat-sobstvennoe-oborudovanie/

Read more: http://vr-zone.com/articles/chip-maker-calxeda-shutters/67439.html

There’s a growing trend to outfit servers with ARM processors. The movement is gaining traction, and not just from interested researchers. Actual investors and manufacturers are giving ARM their attention as well. Chip maker Calxeda was recently granted 55 million USD to make server chips for web hosting that operate on low-power, thanks to ARM processors.

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#SuryaRay #Surya Chinese search engine giant Baidu is using ARM-based servers from Marvell making it the first company to depend on servers using the cell-phone chip in a production environment. Baidu is using the new ARM servers in its cloud storage application named Baidu Pan. ARM, which licenses its IP to a variety of chip makers, had stated its intentions to enter the data center market back in 2010, as worries about energy efficiency increased and the needs of webscale computing customers changed. While less powerful than their Intel counterparts, a cluster of lower-power ARM chips is more power efficient on a performance per watt basis and some workloads don’t even need the performance characteristics of a big Intel core. The combination of these two trends has led to a plethora of vendors from big names like Marvell and AMD to startups such as Calxeda to license ARM’s cores with an eye toward making servers. Holding ARM back so far has been the delay in building out 64-bit capable cores (they are expected later this year) as well as a lack of enterprise software running on the ARM platform. But given the economics of these so-called wimpy cores and the limits of using ARM cores in the enterprise server market today, the use of ARM-based servers in the storage arena is not surprising. Storage usage scenarios are perfect in many ways because they don’t need a lot of raw performance, nor do they require 64-bit capable cores. Thus, Baidu using ARM for storage makes sense. It’s also an area where Calxeda expects to see its first production deployments sometime this year, according to a conversation I had with Karl Freund, the VP of marketing of Calxeda last December. As for the Baidu deployment, it’s using the quad-core Armada CPU, Marvell’s storage controller, and a 10Gb Ethernet switch all integrated on a single system on a chip. Marvell’s release says the chip firm customized the ARM servers specifically for Baidu’s cloud storage requirements, taking the concept of server customization common in webscale deployments to the chip level. Marvell says the platform is designed to increase the amount of storage for conventional 2U chassis up to 96 TB, and to lower the total cost of ownership by 25 percent, compared with previous x86-based server solutions. The end result should cut Baidu’s power in its data center by half according to the release. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro: Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial. * The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech * A 2011 Infrastructure Forecast * Cloud computing’s impact on chip and hardware design http://dlvr.it/2zH4rG @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya Calxeda, the Austin, Texas-based startup that is building out highly dense, low power ARM-based servers has a new market in the storage world. During a visit last week to the company’s headquarters, company executives shared that in addition to web hosting and big data applications it sees a near-term opportunity in the storage world and that is has fielded more than 20 requests for proposals for systems using ARM-based processors. Karl Freund, the VP of marketing for Calxeda, says the company has shipped about 3,000 nodes and 130 systems although none are deployed in production environments yet. He expects the first production deployments to occur at the end of the second quarter of 2013. But most of the conversation was about how ARM-based systems could be used today in the storage market. Not just for cold storage such as Amazon’s Glacier or Facebook’s photo storage effort, but even for the big storage systems for scale out storage and enterprise class storage appliances. Named customers who are evaluating the systems include Scale.io, Gluster and Inktank, the storage startup backed by Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame that is commercializing Ceph. There are more, notes Freund, (pictured) who says that when Calxeda servers make it into production environments, they will likely be deployed first in a storage capacity, as storage customers don’t care if the chips are 64-bit compatible. For now, ARM-based systems are stuck only able to address less memory because ARM only has a 32-bit capable core design. Next year ARM will have a 64-bit capable design and systems will be built around them in 2014 (maybe even late 2013). Calxeda plans its 64-bit capable SoC for 2014. But Calxeda isn’t waiting and in storage, it’s also not focusing on power consumption — the initial draw for ARM-based servers in the scale out data center. For the storage world, where spinning hard drives tends to suck huge quantities of electricity, adding a low-power has a negligable affect on the consumption of an overall system. However, Calxeda boasts that popping in more of its systems on a chip (SoC) are both cheaper and make for faster information transfer and retrieval. Its tests show roughly a 4X improvement in IOPs for a rack of Calxeda SoCs versus x86-based systems. Adding Calexeda’s SoCs also cuts complexity because the entire system of processing and networking components are integrated on the SoC, and the terabit-plus fabric between cores also offers more network capacity between cores in a system –the so-called east-west networking traffic. As the market for scale out computing, storage and networking changes the demands made on IT equipment, Calxeda and others are seeing an opportunity that may have begun in servers and the cloud computing environment, but certainly isn’t stopping there. No wonder Intel is trying to catch up with chips of its own. So far, it’s recently announced new Atom-based chips haven’t made the cut for most customers I’ve spoken with (the lack of integration of the entworking and processing hardware is a problem), but in 2014 it will have a new, integrated SoC as well. Then, the competition will really get interesting. http://dlvr.it/2jBMLQ @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya Calxeda, the Austin, Texas-based chip firm that’s using cell phone chips to build servers, has raised $55 million more from new investors that include Austin Ventures, Vulcan Capital as well as the firm’s existing investors. The company, which just this month said its servers would be in production by the end of the year, had previously raised $48 million in a uniquely structured round designed to get the company all the way to actual customers. The idea of using ARM-based chips in the data center has gained ground as customers who own giant data centers have focused on making their servers more efficient. In several use cases, from serving web pages to some big data applications, using many smaller cores is more energy-efficient that using a few massive cores. It’s part of a larger trend toward matching the server hardware to the workload. The additional funds will no doubt help the company in what will be a slog against a variety of other vendors who also have ARM licensees and see the opportunity in the server market. For example, Calxeda already has deals with server manufacturers such as HP to produce gear that contains its boards, but Dell so far is hedging its bets with a server that uses an ARM design from Marvell. Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, notes that software expertise and specialization will determine who succeeds in this market. He says via email: As in smartphones, the most successful ARM-based server SoC [system on a chip] and platform vendors need to bring software expertise to the game. Some vendors will only bring chip technology to the market which won’t really make a dent in the x86 world. Those like Calxeda who are optimizing for the rack and not just the chip will do well in specialized sections of the new class of exascale data centers. Calxeda’s technology aims to cram as many as 288 quad-core servers using ARM-based chips in a 4u box with a specially made ASIC that handles the network between that multitude of chips. It’s a similar strategy as the one employed by SeaMicro, a company making a similar box using Intel’s low-power Atom chips, which was purchased by AMD earlier this year. As someone wo’s been anticipating the use of alternative processors in the data center since 2008, I’m excited to see the use of ARM cores and even GPUs gaining ground in production environments. Welcome to the era of heterogeneous computing. Looks like Calxeda’s latest investors recognize that it’s here. http://dlvr.it/2HYrNQ @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya Battery Ventures has promoted Itzik Parnafes to general partner as the firm continues to make investments in the enterprise IT sector. The venture firm and Parnafes is betting that the wave of change in IT brought about by large-scale data centers and cloud computing is still providing solid investment opportunities. Parnafes, who is based in Israel, was previously a partner who led Battery’s investment in Delphix, a company that makes software to virtualize databases. Parnafes was also on the board of XtremIO prior to its acquisition by EMC. “The guys keep asking me if our investment in enterprise IT is done yet, but there’s still a lot of opportunity here,” says Parnafes. Itzik Parnafes Battery has been one of the more active venture firms investing in the hardware and infrastructure side of our broadband-influenced and consumer web-obsessed culture with investments in Calxeda, the ARM-server company, Anobit, the flash memory firm that Apple purchased, and Cumulus Networks, a company rethinking switches. It has made more than 20 investments over the past five years in enterprise IT, and put more than $240 million in. What’s going on in enterprise IT–or, frankly, IT. For every Facebook and Pinterest there are hordes of servers and IT personnel trying to figure out how to scale these web-based businesses at costs that still enable them to make money. On the web, your infrastructure and software are the raw materials that comprise your cost of goods sold, so many of these firms are looking to make their infrastructure cheap and elastic. Some buy from cloud providers like Amazon, while others graduate to hosting their own servers and building their own data centers. But this trend hasn’t exactly been a boon for the legacy IT guys as open-source software and commodity hardware have been deployed across hundreds of thousands of feet of raised floor inside data centers. Scale breaks things, and in the last five years venture firms have been investing in software and hardware that helps bridge the gap between legacy and a new hyperscale architecture. But as Parnafes says, there is still opportunity, and that opportunity is in rethinking the architecture itself. Google is doing it with a team of secretive scientists, as are some in the cloud and high performance computing world. Once you build a compute architecture that’s elastic and on-demand, the physical infrastructure constraints — which remains inelastic and isn’t deployed on demand — become a source of pain. Peace, love and interoperability in next-gen IT It’s like once you move to a house in the suburbs you realize that you love the lawn and schools, but you hate the commute. Computing and data centers are now realizing the time they spend provisioning and futzing with the hardware is their equivalent of a long commute. Hence the current vogue for software-defined everything, the rise of Mellanox, which can support both Infiniband and Ethernet networks, and even the purchase of Xsigo by Orcale. The end goal here is a compute architecture that can be just as adaptive as the virtualized services built on top of them. What’s more, workloads and data will be able to flow from one data center (or cloud) to another seamlessly. “These are the prime motives that direct our thinking: what will be in the next generation data center,” Parnafes says.”Look at every constraint you encounter today and try to eliminate them, and if you identify such a technology you have a possible winner on your side.” Parnafes acknowledges that we may never get to this boundary-less world, but he suggests that regulations as opposed to technology or business models will be what stands in the way. To bolster this idea, he points to the CIOs of large banks which have seen the cost efficiencies of running an Amazon-style compute cloud and are trying to emulate Amazon’s costs structure and elasticity as opposed to buying into some vendor-defined private cloud model. “It’s kind of an ironic twist,” Parnafes said. “In the past the public clouds wanted to emulate the private data centers to make people feel comfortable and now the private ones want to emulate the public clouds which have very efficient model for people to run their [compute] jobs.” So as these worlds not only collide, but are coming together in some sort of software-defined and virtualized lovechild, startups that can help ease that transition should give Parnafes a call. --- http://dlvr.it/28Q6MT @suryaray