4 ms·
eh, when I can buy a arm netbook with a reasonable keyboard, I will do so. If someone wants to sell a high-density rack of ARM boards,I'll buy those too (and r
by lsc 16y ago
eh, when I can buy a arm netbook with a reasonable keyboard, I will do so.
If someone wants to sell a high-density rack of ARM boards,I'll buy those too (and rent them out.)
Right now, the available arm boards i've found cost about as much as the atom boards, while the atom supports 4GiB ram, and the arm boards usually come with 256MiB.
Obviously, this makes the arm boards I've found commercially infeasible for the sort of hosting I sell. I don't think it's anything inherent to the arm architecture, I think there just isn't anyone currently designing arm boards for people doing what I do.
- kaib 16y ago> If someone wants to sell a high-density rack of ARM boards,I'll buy those too I'd love to see something like this as well. Just CPU, memory and networking (disks can be served from other machines).
- lsc 16y agoI think the first step is to get some arm motherboards with socketed ram (I'm sorry, but 256MiB ram per server... does not cut it, even in my market.) After that, it's a matter of metal working and a power/network backplane. Personally, I'd prefer a local storage option... separate disks either adds a great deal of expense or a great deal of complexity, or performance issues.
- pjscott 16y agoI would also like ARM processors with a 64-bit address space. Sometimes 4 GB of memory just isn't enough. And sometimes you need to mmap some big files. Still, ARM would be great for some server tasks.
- lsc 16y agohah. first get me a board that can handle more than 4GB of ram, then we can start worrying about 64-bit address space.
- cperciva 16y agoJust CPU, memory and networking (disks can be served from other machines). I'd like to see ARM boards with disks attached. I have a recurring daydream of having a cheap ARM board I can plug into the back of a SATA drive to give it an ethernet port and a small amount of application logic. When you get right down to it, the two places where disk is most important -- bulk data storage and database back-end storage -- need vanishingly small amounts of CPU power. Why buy a general-purpose rackmount box costing $1000 and 200W to put your disks into if you can get an ARM board costing $80 and 5W?
- wmf 16y agoThere's a very interesting paper about an archival storage system built with that kind of hardware: http://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/storer/storer_html/ http://www.usenix.org/events/fast08/tech/full_papers/storer/...