Calxeda Lays Out a Vision for the Hyper-Efficient Datacenter

Plans Include New Platforms for Cloud and Warehouse-Scale Datacenters

Austin, TX, October 17, 2012 – Calxeda, the company that first invented the concept of using ARM® technology to slash datacenter power, today announced its vision and roadmap to extend the company’s leadership in the hyper-efficient computing market.  Following the recent announcement of $55 million in additional capital, this news outlines Calxeda’s plans to catalyse rapid market adoption and the creation of an entirely new category of IT products.

The Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000, now available, has been called one of the most disruptive technologies in the IT industry today*.  The company has now shipped thousands of early EnergyCore SoCs to OEM customers and end users, and is providing free access to the technology on the OpenStack Trystack.org cloud. The product is now available in servers from Penguin Computing, who announced its partnership with Calxeda today, in addition to long-time partners Boston Limited and Hewlett-Packard.

The Calxeda roadmap implements a two-pronged strategy to reach additional markets.   The first enables optimized racks for public and private clouds, while the second will enable and span massive warehouse-scale datacenters. 

“We are very excited about the market’s response to our pioneering first generation product,” said Barry Evans, Calxeda’s founder and CEO.  “Now we are taking it two steps further to reinvent the server, first into a rack-based cloud appliance, and then extending into an integrated fleet of computing resources, spanning many thousands of efficient servers.”

Calxeda’s second-generation platform, code-named “Midway,” opens new markets for Calxeda. “It’s all about finding the right balance of I/O, Storage, networking, management, memory and computational elements for each target market segment,” added Evans. “This is the beauty of an ARM-based SoC approach: each platform can be tailored to add more value by addressing the unique needs of a specific workload.”  

To go after cloud applications such as dynamic web hosting and more computationally intensive Big Data analytics, Midway delivers more performance, more memory and hardware virtualization support using standard CortexA15 ARM cores.  In addition, Calxeda’s second generation fabric will support new features such as dynamic power and routing optimization for public and private clouds.  Midway will be available in volume in 2013.

“64-bit ARM architecture-based production servers are years away,” said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy. “Calxeda’s approach to shipping 32-bit technology today and upgrading to the ARM A15 in 2013 makes a lot of sense for specialized workloads in the largest datacenters.”  

Calxeda’s third generation platform, code-named “Lago,” is Calxeda’s platform for the warehouse-scale datacenter.  Built on the 64-bit ARM V8 architecture, Lago features Calxeda’s third generation scaling features, called the Calxeda Fleet Services™, to further automate and optimize common operations at massive scale.  The enhanced fabric will also connect hundreds of thousands of nodes, with quality of service features and the ability to allocate and control resources. 

“We expect to lead the industry with new concepts that will change the datacenter in ways far beyond just lowering power and increasing density,” continued Evans. “Lago will be in the first wave of 64-bit complete systems and application stacks on ARM in 2014, and we are collaborating with key partners to ensure that customers can ramp quickly with production-quality software and OS support for both Midway and Lago.”

Calxeda Trailblazer partners continue to be critical in collaborating to  develop the required ecosystem.  The Trailblazer initiative provides early access to Calxeda technology for collaborative development and innovation with Calxeda’s engineers and architects.  Canonical has been a Trailblazer partner since the program’s inception and shared this:

“Canonical believes that ARM-based servers deliver significant efficiency savings for enterprises. As part of our long term collaboration, we’ve delivered Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on Calxeda hardware,” said Steve George, vice president, Canonical.  ”Today, we welcome the Calxeda team’s extended roadmap and look forward to continuing our partnership with Calxeda as we bring the benefits of power efficient hyperscale computing to datacenters.”

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.