Calxeda and Fedora Project Deploy Servers on Path to Make ARM a Primary Architecture

Boston Viridis Servers With Calxeda EnergyCore® Accelerate Application Development and Lower Barrier for Porting and Supporting ARM Software Ecosystem for the Fedora Project

Austin, TX, May 15, 2013 – Calxeda, a leader in the low power server market, today announced the deployment of Boston Ltd. Viridis servers embedded with Calxeda EnergyCore® chips for the Fedora Project. The availability of the Calxeda-based server cluster is a critical step in helping the Fedora community enable ARM into a primary architecture. This installation, the first enterprise/server-class ARM servers deployed for the ARM port of Fedora, is targeted at the project’s software build infrastructure and accelerates the ability to target the ARM architecture, something the community sees as an emerging industry trend for datacenters in this era of ultra-efficient servers.

“It is nice to see the impact of ARM-based production servers on the Fedora Project,” said Robyn Bergeron, Fedora Project leader, Red Hat.  ”The new hardware, and help from Calxeda, Red Hat and other Linaro Enterprise Group members, will facilitate ongoing development of Fedora for the ARM architecture.” 

Earlier this year, the Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, announced the availability of Fedora 18, the latest version of its free, open source operating system distribution. Among new ARM architecture-specific features added to Fedora 18 is support for industry standards such as Pre-boot Execution Environment (PXE-boot) technology, a method that is frequently used in datacenter automation to simplify operating system installation on servers. That feature was heavily leveraged by the Fedora Project while deploying the cluster of four high-density Calxeda-powered Viridis systems (each with 24 servers inside).

For the deployment, the Fedora Project migrated off of old infrastructure to the Calxeda-based server cluster which enabled physical consolidation of multiple generations of developer boards into a uniform server environment for the ongoing build and validation activities of the project. This deployment of ARM servers is the first time the Fedora community has been able to use the standard deployment tools like PXE and Kickstart on an ARM system. Since deployment into production, the performance and reliability of the new hardware continues to deliver impressive performance, accelerating application development, and lowering the barrier for porting and supporting the ARM software ecosystem.

“We are thrilled to have been chosen as the launching pad for accelerating ARM into a primary Fedora architecture. The Fedora Project team’s experience – from install to deployment to production – is a testament to compatibility of Linux code on Calxeda: it just works,” said Karl Freund, Vice President, Marketing, Calxeda.  “That is what datacenters will expect and demand from ARM platforms, and we plan to deliver.” 

About Calxeda

Founded in January 2008, Calxeda brings new performance density to the datacenter with revolutionary server-on-a-chip technology. Calxeda currently employs 100 professionals in Austin Texas and the Silicon Valley area. Calxeda is funded by a unique syndicate comprising industry leading venture capital firms and semiconductor innovators, including ARM Holdings, Advanced Technology Investment Company, Austin Ventures, Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners and Vulcan Capital. See www.calxeda.com for more information.

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 .