UK hardware maker and distributor releases ARM cluster

St Alban’s company, Boston is offering a ARM based cluster that delivers data centre performance at 5W per node.

There is a lot of interest from corporate clients in low-powered server and storage and clustered solutions, and Boston claims to be the first to manufacture ultra-low power servers based on ARM processor technology.

Unlike conventional x86 platforms, the Boston Viridis uses ultra-low power ARM-based System-on-Chips (SoC’s) which consuming as little as 5 Watts per SoC.

The Boston Viridis is tuned to provide supercomputing performance whilst delivering a 90 per cent reduction in energy costs compared with conventional servers.

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.

This means that it can providing up to 192 cores and 48 nodes per enclosure which is so dense it contains up to 900 servers per industry standard 42U rack.

The package is powered by Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS and Fedora v17+ distributions and 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.

David Power, Head of HPC at Boston, is demonstrating the cluster at the IP EXPO in London.

We have used nearly 20 years of specialist experience in high-performance server manufacturing to come to market ahead of some of the world’s bigger IT companies.

Boston has been a key player in the Uk’s distribution and OEM marketplace for the last 20 years.