BOSTON—The data center is being re-architected to automate and accelerate the delivery of services while accommodating the massive influx of data, to achieve this IT modernization hardware underpinnings are being abstracted away from programmers who are reaping immense productivity gains because of it.
That was the take-away from a lively panel I participated on this week at the Red Hat Summit here in Boston this week. Moderated by the irrepressible Jon Masters, Chief ARM Architect with Red Hat, the panel weighed the question: “ARM servers: Myth or Reality.”
While the adoption of ARM servers technology in the data center is in its early days, the verdict was unanimous: It’s reality.
“ARM servers: Myth or Reality.” Jeff Underhill talks on a panel at the Red Hat Summit
“I think the data center is primed for re-architecture, and that includes the adoption of heterogeneous computing,” said Elsie Wahlig, director of product management, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies. ARM “servers are a reality.”
Larry Wikelius, vice president of Software Ecosystem & Solutions Group, Cavium, noted there are a certain number of critical applications and data center workloads that can benefit from a new approach. “You can improve performance and cost at the silicon level, cost of operations,” he said. “That’s what you’re seeing come out of this architecture.”
The ARM based server model is enabling differentiation in the data center, in terms of total cost of ownership, hardware acceleration, security, network offload. This innovation can happen at a silicon level, so long as it is effortless for the user to exploit, he said. “That starts to spur innovation and capability further up the stack that you can’t do today with the volume server” Wikelius said.
For me, sitting among these industry luminaries, the name of the game is “standardization & abstraction.” We are abstracting away the underpinnings of the platform and must avoid developing snowflakes that would require more explicit knowledge of the underlying platform and architecture. No one wants to have to code for eight different platforms! That’s why this data center re-architecting, as Elsie put it, is moving towards a focus on driving programmer productivity, if we do this right the underlying platform really doesn’t matter. We’ve just got to get out of the developers way and let them do what they do best – innovate and code!
We discussed how the slowing of Moore’s Law affects technology development. That prompted an interesting question from an audience member, who noted that ARM’s traditional technological strength has been in low power. What does that mean in the server space?
Martin Stadtler, director of Linaro Enterprise Group, responded by saying ARM’s technology advantage is that there is not one single roadmap. In fact, the ARM technology roadmap is decoupled from the silicon vendors, and the silicon vendors differentiate on top of it. There are low-power ARM devices, high-performance devices and of course the inclusion of domain specific accelerators that add another layer of choice and flexibility to designs. The potential solutions differ from one vendor to the next but all built on a common instruction set and grounded in standards that ensure software portability across all platforms thereby protecting the investments.
“Instead of having a horse you have a zoo,” Stadtler joked.
Wikelius brought up Microsoft’s recent announcement that it was able to run more than half of its internal workloads on ARM server technology. “Look at Microsoft, satisfying that level of Azure workload” with ARM servers technology, he said. “We have that base, and now you can pivot. Do I want more acceleration to build in? Do I want more density? Now I have legitimate choices.”
Zachary Smith, CEO and co-founder of single-tenant bare-metal server company Packet, said his company has focused on a completely uniform user experience whether it's for x86 or ARM. "It is identical," he said. He added that audience members could signup with a free trial code and would soon be able to deploy an unsupported Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview. More on that news coming soon!
For more information on ARM servers, check out our developer site