HP has its Redstone-line servers with an efficient ARM chips have been revealed. The prototypesysteem contains 288 ARM quadcores of the company Calxeda into a 4u enclosure. HP works under the name of Project Moonshot to energy efficient servers.
The first Redstone servers come in the first half of next year in a limited edition available for a select group of HP customers. The systems are equipped with ECX-1000 EnergyCore system-on-a-chips from Calxeda, which are built up around two or four ARM Cortex A9 cores with a clock speed of 1.1 to 1.4 GHz. The soc are optimized for use in servers and support five external and three internal 10Gb channels, ipmi 2.0 and dcmi-management protocols, and network proxy support to maintain network connectivity, even if the node is turned off.
Calxeda delivers four soc’s on a board and provides it with four memory slots and pci interconnects. HP may, at Redstone-trays in three rows of six cards, for a total of 72 ECX-1000-soc. By four trays in a ProLiant SL6500 4u-case, the result is a server with 288 servernodes. The server contains three psu’s and eight fans.
The EnergyCores use just 1.5 W, which is less than about 8W, which, for example, Atom-chips. HP also made known that the future of the servers of Project Moonshot on Intel Atoms are going. HP focuses the project on the development of fuel-efficient servers for large companies who have services to offer and when faced with a growing server farm and increasing energy costs. According to HP, the systems of Project Moonshot, an addition to the current Proliant systems, with traditional Intel – and AMD-serverchips be equipped.
It is unclear whether HP is the first result of Project Moonshot, the Redstone servers, next year’s commercial release and what it is going to cost you.