Boston Limited Ships First ARM?-Based Servers to Bring Low-Power Economics to High-Performance Data Centers

Author
SySAdmin
Posted
July 23, 2012
Views
1147

Page All:

Page 1
Boston Limited Ships First ARM(R)-Based Servers to Bring Low-Power Economics to High-Performance Data Centers

ST ALBANS, England, July 23, 2012/PRNewswire/ --

    Big data, web apps, HPC and media streaming to benefit from technology that consumes
less than 1/10th the power of conventional servers

    Boston Limited, the leading manufacturer of high performance, low-powered server,
storage and clustered solutions, has begun manufacturing and worldwide distribution of its
innovative Viridis server, based on Calxeda EnergyCore(TM) SoC (System on a Chip)
leveraging ultra-low power ARM processors.

    The Boston Viridis platform is the first to enter general availability in a new
generation of data center servers based on technology from ARM, whose chip designs power
the Apple(R) iPhone(R), iPad(R) and many other low-power consumer devices. Consuming as
little as 5 watts per SoC, the ultra low-powered Calxeda EnergyCore SoC is designed
specifically to provide supercomputing performance while consuming less than one tenth the
power that many of today's processors use.

    This new technology is set to radically redefine the economics of a range of
compute-intensive applications such as data analysis and modeling ('Big Data'),
high-volume web applications, high performance computing (HPC) and media streaming. Power
consumption (and related costs such as heat dissipation) make up a significant proportion
of running costs in large-scale data centers. Reducing energy costs tenfold not only
slashes existing costs but also enables the development of new applications that had not
previously been viable.

    The Boston Viridis server harnesses a revolutionary new approach to energy-efficient
computing based on the low power consumption of EnergyCore SoC processors compared to
traditional x86-based architectures. Provisioned within a 2U enclosure, each Boston
Viridis unit contains up to 12 quad-node EnergyCards with built-in Layer-2 networking,
plus storage in the form of up to 24 local SATA disks or MicroSD cards. With up to 48
nodes per enclosure, this highly dense solution contains up to 900 servers per industry
standard 42U rack, providing customers with industry-leading power, space and cost
savings.

    Supported by Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS and Fedora v17+ distributions, the Calxeda
EnergyCore SoC has been shown to run popular software platforms including Cloud Management
software from Openstack, Big Data technologies such as Hadoop, Cassandra, applications
built in Java, Ruby on Rails, Python and the popular LAMP stack.

    Manoj Nayee, Managing Director of Boston Limited, said, "After months of development
and excitement, Boston is delighted to begin distributing our Calxeda ARM-based Viridis
servers. With around 90% improvements in energy efficiency and density, we are seeing a
huge level of interest from customers across the globe!"

    Karl Freund, VP of Marketing of Calxeda, said "Boston is enabling the developing
ARM-server ecosystem the opportunity to test and experiment with one of the biggest
game-changers in the data centre featuring our EnergyCore SOC. We are excited to be
working closely with the engineering team at Boston to bring this technology to market."

    About Boston Limited

    With nearly 20 years of trading within the distribution and OEM marketplace, Boston
continues to lead the way in providing the latest high-performance, power-optimized
technologies into the data centre, HPC, ISP, Military, VFX, Enterprise and Broadcast
markets with multi-award winning server, storage, workstation and clustered solutions.
Since the successful launch of Boston IT Solutions (India) Private Limited in 2009, we
announced the launch of Boston Server & Storage Solutions GmbH in 2010. Expansion into
both regions has been driven purely by market demand for alternate vendors providing
high-performance and high value-add systems. As our global reach continues to expand we
plan on opening further global facilities to improve and expand the services we offer. For
more information about Boston, please visit http://www.boston.co.uk and follow
@BostonLimited on Twitter.

    To find out more and to download high resolution images, please visit:

   
    - The Boston Viridis server datasheet
      [http://download.boston.co.uk/downloads/9/3/2/932c4ecb-692a-47a9-937d-a94bd0f3df1b/viridis.pdf ]
    - White-paper: Revolutionising the data centre
      [http://www.boston.co.uk/info/whitepapers/revolutionising-the-data-centre.aspx ]
    - High resolution Boston logos
      [http://www.boston.co.uk/about/marketing/branding.aspx ]

    For more information and review samples please contact Apostolos Lambrianides,
Marketing Executive, Apostolos.lambrianides@boston.co.uk.

    Boston Limited, Unit 5 Curo Park, Frogmore, St Albans, Hertfordshire, AL2 2DD, UK,
Telephone: +44(0)1727-876-10

Source: Boston Ltd

Title

Medium Image View Large