ARM In the Datacenter Isn't Dead Yet (theregister.co.uk)

prpplague writes: Despite Linus Torvald's recent claims ARM won't win in the server space, there are very specific use cases where ARM is making advances into the datacenter. One of those is for use with software-defined storage with open-source projects like CEPH. In a recent The Register article, Softiron's CTO Phil Straw states about their ARM-based CEPH appliances: "It's a totally shitty computer, but what we are trying to do here is storage, and not compute, so when you look at the IO, when you look at the buffering, when you look at the data paths, there's amazing performance -- we can approach something like a quarter of a petabyte, at 200Gbps wireline throughput." Straw claimed that, on average, SoftIron servers run 25C cooler than a comparable system powered by Xeons." So... ARM in the datacenter might be saying, "I'm not quite dead yet!"

Comments

Re:Not "dead yet".. It has not even grown up yet.

[Spazmania]

it reverses the traditional storage server layout by moving CPUs to the front of the PCB and storage drives to the back. This means cool air from the fans blows over the drives first, and then the CPUs â" which wouldn't make any sense in a compute server.

Um... What?

Modern servers cool front to back. They place the drives in front where they are cooled first. Some place the CPUs behind the drives. Others place the CPUs in parallel with the drives so that they're also cooled directly from ambient air.

No one in their right mind places the drives after the CPUs. Losing a CPU is just money. Losing the drive is everything.

Were you maybe trying to say they put the fans in front of the drives instead of behind them, pushing air instead of pulling it? That doesn't make any real difference to the cooling, but it makes hot-swap harder.

If these machines actually cool back to front, that's a bad thing. Modern data centers are laid out with a hot-aisle cold-aisle design. The wiring and exhaust side (the back) faces the hot aisle. Equipment which reverses that flow effs everything up. Cisco is especially bad about this, but servers mostly get it right.