Redhat put Calxeda based ARM servers in to production

Fedora lends a helping ARM to….. OK, awful pun there, sorry.

Calxeda LogoCalxeda is now officially part of the Redhat Fedora project with the migration of the ARM build servers to a Calxeda cluster. There are a few reasons why a little server move like this matters more than you might think.

Moving from a bunch of ARM based servers to a Calxeda based Boston Viridis cluster is not a big deal in and of itself. Projects move hosting providers and servers all the time but this one is different because it moves from a bunch of Rasberry Pi development boxes to a production based ARM server. The first bit to note is the part about production based ARM servers being deployed for real world jobs. The second is that Calxeda was the architecture chosen by Redhat for ARM work.

Redhat is porting their distro to ARM architectures and Calxeda is the first major enterprise ARM server architecture to be released for the public to buy off the shelf. There have probably been other production ARM deployments or one kind or other that didn’t make headlines before this, but if there are SemiAccurate hasn’t heard of them. Either way, you can now say that ARM is deployed as a real world server architecture doing real world work.

That work may be building the Redhat/Fedora ARM distro and related software stacks but that is still real world work. As of Fedora 18’s release a few months ago, ARM is now or will soon be an officially supported architecture. Redhat choosing Calxeda servers to do their porting on is also a pretty big hint as to who is the leading enterprise ARM server architecture. Before you point out that there really aren’t any other ARM servers out there for a company to buy, you would suspect that Redhat has access to more unreleased hardware than the average web shopper trolling Amazon.

So in the end there are two milestones here. There is now an official production enterprise ARM server deployment acknowledged by both the buyer and seller. Next is that ARM servers are well on their way to being a first class citizen of the Redhat stack, and Calxeda is the architecture of choice there. A lot of people have been taking the wait and see approach to ARM servers in the data center, SemiAccurate has been waiting, and we now see that they are there. As we said over a year ago, if your application fits the solution ARM servers offer, they should be considered along with all the other available options on pure merit. Redhat did and they are now running some Calxeda servers. What next?S|A

The following two tabs change content below.

Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate