Collaboration brings release of world's most powerful servers

With these products, the partnership has produced a compelling, high performance alternative to the incumbent solutions in the market. GIGABYTE and Cavium had the honour of inviting ecosystem partners - ARM, Innodisk, Linaro, Qlogic, Red Hat, and Suse - all of which have committed resource to bringing ARM-based servers to the mainstream enterprise market - as guest speakers at the event. GIGABYTE and Cavium are working with these stakeholders to bring higher performance-per-dollar to the server market and open up a range of potential new applications.

This solution targets high performance volume servers deployed by Public/Private Cloud and Telco data centres. It is optimised for key data centre workloads including compute, security, storage, and distributed databases. GIGABYTE ThunderX servers deliver comparable performance at a more compelling TCO than traditional x86 server systems.

Key GIGABYTE ThunderX server features

GIGABYTE has utilised its know-how to become the first and only server vendor to capture the benefits of Cavium’s revolutionary design and bring disruptive new solutions to the market through production-ready server products, which bring about:

• adoption of the first dual-socket ARM SoC architecture that scales up to 48 cores per processor with up to 2.0GHz core frequency
• the highest integrated I/O capability with up to 160Gb of I/O bandwidth
• four DDR4 72 bit memory controllers capable of supporting up to 1TB of memory in a dual socket configuration at 2133MHz
• best in class performance per watt and performance per dollar for storage and compute applications
• a comprehensive range of designs, from cost-focused entry level solutions to high density storage and compute focused platforms

"GIGABYTE has developed and is already shipping a range of Cavium ThunderX-based server products to customers in US, Europe and Asia," said Andy Chen, AVP, Network and Communications Business Unit, GIGABYTE. "Our comprehensive portfolio of ThunderX-based systems is available for order and a number of customers have already received production units. We are seeing strong demand for these ARM-based platforms – especially from cloud service providers."

 A comprehensive ecosystem is key to the development of a market for ARM-based servers. To this end, we have been working with stakeholders across the value chain. GIGABYTE’s release partners contributed their views on co-operation and the market in general:

ARM:
"The momentum for ARM-based servers is building and the new range of server products from GIGABYTE and Cavium enhances choice for companies seeking to match compute needs with the most energy and cost-effective solutions,” said Lakshmi Mandyam, Senior Marketing Director of server program, ARM. “It is excellent to see ARM partners at the heart of driving innovative solutions that are delivering to the rigorous demands of cloud data centre application and workload diversity.”

CAVIUM:
“The ARM server market is beginning to expand and grow and mature” said Rishi Chugh, Director, Data Center Processor Group at Cavium. “GIGABYTE is the perfect partner to lead this effort and showcase the breadth of ThunderX-based workload optimised server platforms delivering the flexibility and performance required for next gen cloud data centres.”

Red Hat:
"Red Hat1 has been collaborating with GIGABYTE for quite some time via the Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program, as they worked to develop systems based on Cavium's ThunderX processor family," said Tim Burke, Vice President, Linux Engineering, Red Hat. "These new, scalable servers serve as an excellent example of the technical innovation and standardisation efforts within the growing ARM ecosystem. We are very pleased that as a result of our joint efforts we currently have Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server for ARM Development Preview running on GIGABYTE systems in lab and development environments."

Innodisk:
“Innodisk is a leading provider of industrial-grade storage solutions. Innodisk’s miniDIMM and RDIMM series solutions, especially aimed at server and telecommunication applications, have been certified by GIGABYTE and Cavium. Innodisk has collaborated with GIGABYTE and CAVIUM for years and looks forward to continuing to provide the best storage solutions in this field,” said Samson Chang, Vice President, Embedded DRAM division of Innodisk.

SUSE:
“SUSE’s collaboration with Cavium and GIGABYTE has helped to bring AArch64 and cloud solutions to our customers, a development which is also highly meaningful for the development of the industry,” said Andy Jiang, Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan General Manager with SUSE. “With the hyper-scale hardware of GIGABYTE, SUSE can now deliver the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Enterprise Storage and SUSE OpenStack Cloud to our clients. Cavium and GIGABYTE have demonstrated strong leadership in the ARM server market, and SUSE will work continue to closely with them.”

QLogic:
“The advent of data centre-class ARM processors provide end users options to tailor hardware to suit specific workloads,” said Greg Scherer, Vice President and CTO, QLogic. “The new ThunderX-based servers push the envelope of compute and drive the need for higher speed I/O.”