PayPal Deploys ARM Servers in Data Centers

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PayPal Deploys ARM Servers in Data Centers | Data Center Knowledge

[FONT=Open Sans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]"Applied Micro’s PayPal announcement was focused on cost benefits of ARM servers. “The X-Gene-equipped units [at PayPal] cost approximately one-half the price of traditional data center infrastructure hardware and incurred only one-seventh of the annual running cost,” Golpi said."[/FONT]

[FONT=Open Sans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]This morning, I turned on a HP Proliant server with two Xeon processors. Right away the lady next office came to make fun at me, she said: Did an airplane just take off? [/FONT]

[FONT=Open Sans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]The heat generated form the Intel Xeon processors, memory, and hard drives are enormous so there are 6 powerful internal cooling fans to cool them down. In full speed, those fans are really noisy!

After so many years of buying, installing, and maintaining servers, I think this approach is really stupid. Because so much heat a server can generate, a typical data center requires a lot heavy duty cooling and power infrastructure to operate. If an ARM powered server can use much less electricity, occupy less space, and generate less heat, even with less computing power, people will buy them. One reason is many today's servers are clustered together to achieve higher performance and better reliability. Individual server's performance is important but not the only factor to decide the server purchase. The heat handling and electricity consumption are often the serious concern in building and maintaining a data center. [/FONT]

 

[Daniel Payne]

Let's see if ARM-based servers gain market share at the expense of Intel-based servers. ARM executives think that they can grow their market-share in servers from under 1% today to 20% in 5 years. UPDATE 1-Chip designer ARM sees 20 pct market share in servers by 2020 | Reuters

Lower power always makes sense to me for servers, that is certainly a smart way to differentiate your product offering.

 

[Staf_Verhaegen]

Let's see if ARM-based servers gain market share at the expense of Intel-based servers. ARM executives think that they can grow their market-share in servers from under 1% today to 20% in 5 years. UPDATE 1-Chip designer ARM sees 20 pct market share in servers by 2020 | Reuters

If the history of SPARC is any indication they will have a hard time of getting that market share; these computers were marketed with the same advantage: more throughput for less power consumption. Advantage for ARM is the CPU support with Android and Linux for RasPI, Zynq devices etc.