HPCwire: Boston Limited Builds ARM Servers

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July 23, 2012

Boston Limited Builds ARM Servers

ST ALBANS, United Kingdom, July 23 -- 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 EnergyCoreTM 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® iPhone®, iPad® 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 www.boston.co.uk and follow @BostonLimited on Twitter.

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Source: Boston Limited

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