Boston Viridis 2.0 and AAEON CRS-200S-2R ARM Based Servers Powered by Calxeda Quad core Cortex A15 SoC

Calxeda unveiled its new ECX-2000 Server-on-a-Chip (SoC) at ARM Techcon 2013. Calxeda new chipset features 4 cortex A15 cores, support up to 16GB RAM, and thanks to the move from Cortex A9 to Cortex A15 supports hardware virtualization. I’ve stumbled across two new servers powered by ECX-2000: Boston Viridis 2.0 and AAEON-CRS-200S-2R. Let’s have a look

Boston Viridis 2.0

The successor of Boston Viridis powered by Calxeda ECX-1000 quad core Cortex A9 SoC, Viridis 2.0 features six ECX-2000 cards, with each card hosting two four-core SoCs @ 1.8GHz, and consuming as little as 6 watts of power. The server runs Ubuntu 13.10 operating systems, and OpenStack Havana platform, and would typically be used for cloud computing, distributed storage, and virtualization.

Viridis 2.0 is a 4U ARM microserver that, and the company claims this can allow up to 1000+ servers in a rack, or about 1.5PB of data storage per rack. The 4U form factor permits configuration with both 36x 3.5″ drives or 72x 2.5″ drives, providing up to 144TB per enclosure.

You can find a little more information on Boston Viridis page.

AAEON CRS-200S-2R

AAEON, a subsidiary of ASUS, and an Industrial PCs manufacturer, showcased CRS-200S-2R storage solutions at ARM Techcon 2013. This is the first ARM-based storage solution part of the Poseidon family of rackmount products targeting applications such as cloud computing, high-density storage appliances and IP surveillance. A similar AAEON solution was also presented at Computex 2013, most probably with Energycore ECX-1000. Here are some of the key features of AAEON CRS-200S-2R 1U system:

• 12x 3.5″ SATA drives for up to 48TB storage
• 3x Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-2000 series SoCs
• Power Consumption – 150W including 12 hard drives, against 250W for an equivalent x86 storage server solution.

Information is limited, but if we can refer to CRS-300S-2R (1U/12 SATA drive) powered by Intel Xeon E3-1200/1200 v2, the server should run the Hadoop platform, and come with 5 to 7 years of guaranteed product life (availability).

Charbax of ARMDevices.net interviewed the company at the conference.

AAEON CRS-200S-2R should eventually show up on the company’s cloud solutions microsite.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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