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New Technology'Server on a Chip' Aims to Lighten Up Cloud Hardware

Posted by nasi On Wednesday 9 November 2011 0 comments

New Technology 'Server on a Chip' Aims to Lighten Up Cloud Hardware  

Servers don't just cost money also cost technology space and power. In order to address those issues, a company called Calxeda is developing Energy Core technology, a so-called server on a chip. It's taking notes from a sector in which space conservation and the optimization of power consumption are top priorities: the cellphone industry.

While the image that the high-tech industry has adopted for the source of services delivered over a remote network -- the cloud technology -- conjures thoughts of airy skies where quasi-magical things happen, the actual cloud is firmly anchored to the ground in data centers bristling with computer servers. As the cloud continues to expand, so does the demand for servers technology -- servers that consume more and more resources like electricity, space and capital.
 An obvious answer is to create servers technology that consume less power, take up less space and cost less to deploy. And that's what a company called Calxeda says its new EnergyCore "server on a chip" will do for servers that use it.Calxeda announced its EnergyCore processor Tuesday at simultaneous events held in Austin, Texas, where the company is headquartered, and Palo Alto, Calif., where HP (NYSE: HPQ) revealed its intention to include the chip in its first generation of extreme low-energy server technology development platforms.

Tech News World

"Most large enterprises, and even Web-scale companies, have an insatiable need for more power in the data center," Calxeda Director of Product Marketing John Mao told TechNewsWorld, "and the top constraining factors that they face to obtain that power is the lack of energy running into the buildings and the amount of space that they have."Data center operators will tell you that they have plenty of money and budget to buy more servers, but they can't get them physically deployed because of those two reasons," he added.
A problem with a server based on ARM technology is that it doesn't support 64-bit processing, according to SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman. Because ARM only supports 32-bit processing, it can't address as much memory as a 64-bit processor technology, he explained.
"Each core gets only one gigabyte of memory," he told TechNewsWorld. "That's very little memory."
Calxeda's Mao, however, discounted the need for a 64-bit processor technology. The reason nearly all data centers use servers with 64-bit processor is that they can't get their hands on servers with 32-bit processors, he opined. "There have been a lot of end-users that have come back to us and said, 'You know what? Actually, 32-bit will work.'"

technology used

However, "it won't work for everything," he conceded. "But where it matters for efficiency, 32 bits is just fine. In fact, it may be better because it's more efficient than what they've seen on their other platforms."Peter ffoulkes, research director for servers and virtualizaton technology for the 451 Group in Boston, also frowned on the importance of 64-bit support."It's not that big of an obstacle," he told TechNewsWorld. "There's an awful lot of people still running 32-bit applications."Moreover, the kind of jobs the processors would be called on to do could easily be distributed across a number of 32-bit processors just as well as a number of 64-bit ones, he explained."You don't need a big 64-bit memory space to do that," he said. "You just give each processor two gigs of data or four gigs of data at a time and let them work on it."
 For companies with thousands of servers delivering Web services, social media and simple content delivery applications, HP said, Project Moonshot is designed to deliver new and improved technology simplicity while achieving energy and cost savings never before possible.

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