While we are all well-behaved boys and girls, patiently waiting for an onslaught of Via Nano-based netbooks and low-cost laptops so we can give the, well, you know, to Intel and AMD, those sneaky people over at Dell have unveiled an entirely different type of computer using the Nano platform: a server.
When talking about power-efficiency in processors and chips we often tend to think of laptops and especially netbooks, but that doesn’t mean the server world cannot benefit from these types of chips as well. Dell has realised that, and today unveiled its XS11-VX8 server, which uses Via Nano processors. Users can stick 12 of these servers into a 2U chassis.
Via Nano processors are clocked anywhere between 1.0 and 1.8Ghz, using a 65-nanometer manufacturing process, and only consume 15W of power when the operating system is idle, and when running a full application load, it rises to only 20-29W (quite impressive). Nano chips are also fully 64bit capable, and have hardware virtualisation extensions.
The XS11-VX8, codenamed “Fortuna”, is designed for what Dell calls “hyper-scaling”, a scenario where for instance search engine and web hosting businesses need to stuff as many servers into an as little a space as possible. Often, these customers use 1U servers or simply tower models, but these are not space or power efficient. As such, Dell’s DCS team (apparently known as a skunkworks team) set out to design a solution specifically for this market:
The Fortuna solution was designed from day one to solve this specific customer problem without compromise. Leveraging the Via Nano CPU, we can deliver an incredibly low-power solution of 20-29 Watts/server at full load (that isn’t a typo), and 15 Watts/server at OS idle. In addition, there are no compromises on enterprise features like 64-bit operating systems, 1-to-1 virtualization, and remote management via IPMI.However, what usually catches most customers’ attention is the form factor. With a size slightly larger than a 3.5-inch hard drive, Fortuna is a “hot-plug” server with its own dedicated memory, storage, BMC, and dual 1GbE NIC’s. The chassis exists to provide power, cooling, and a mechanism to mount in a rack. This provides unprecedented density – supporting six servers per rack unit (U) or 252 servers in a 42U rack.
This is a pretty interesting server, and priced at only USD 400, it’s not exactly expensive either. It’s also good news for Via, which has trouble competing with its Nano platform in a market dominated by Intel’s Atom.
I would like to get some of these for our data center but…
“But note: these are not Dell PowerEdge servers available to all customers but are an advancement that Dell is bringing to customer’s whose data center is their factory”
sounds like it is only for large customers.
lacks performance numbers…
It seems as if this device lives in the same deployment space, doesn’t it?
Would love to see some specifications, and price.
What’s the price for 5 of these (ie, 60 “servers”) compared to say, HP’s or IBM’s bladecenters (they’re often 9-11U and contains some 14 quad-core servers). Then, what’s the price of running these at full go for a year? How many mflops/cent over a years time?
Where is this product interesting? Just for web servers and the like, or for heavy compute farms too?
This move is targeted at organizations that need many isolated environments like web hosting sites (see the inquirer article). Because of this the metric you suggested, mflops/cent/yr is probably not appropriate.
Perhaps transactions/watt/cent would be better?
Another interesting idea would be encryption. These VIA Nano processors are the only x86 CPUs (besides the earlier VIA C7) with built in encryption instructions.
If you needed to encrypt a lot of data on the fly this would rock. When it comes to encryption a Nano at 1.8 GHz is 93% faster than a 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Quad QX9770 processor, so image what 12 of these blades could push.
With good scaling (which happens in this kind of task, they could do about 8.9 GBytes/s
. (http://hothardware.com/cs/forums/t/40368.aspx )
I would like to add that performance is not all.
There are some resources that are IO bound and the server may be in itself not CPU limited factor. Like keeping a router or to migrate a bigger old server let’s say a 5 year old system like 2U Pentium 4 1.6GHz, to a low power consumption server. Also, reducing the power envelope in today’s time is a good factor!
They have actually tried to break into the DC market with DP-310 mini-ITX mobo. It was supposed to have 4 low power(electrically) processors in 1U.
Using netbook processors inside servers is one of those ideas that will disappear very quickly.
Do you remember when XML files were going to replace databases on websites? Some web developers tried to implement websites around an XML file rather than a database management system, discovered that it doesn’t scale past a handful of concurrent users and is a bitch to maintain, and promptly ditched the idea.
I use an Atom-powered home server and I certainly wouldn’t dream of using it as an enterprise server. Sure, the computer’s uptime is the same as its age, but I pity the poor sod who tries to put any sort of load through it.
Yes, you can pack a number of them into one rack, but each machine will have the overhead of the operating system plus whatever sort of load balancing is being done. It simply won’t be efficiently scalable. As a person who owns two Atom-based computers, I know it won’t be scalable (and the Via Nano isn’t *that* much better than an Atom).
Of course, it will be much less scalable if you try to run a website with an XML-file backend on a rack full of mini-ITX Via Nano machines…
Wow. You’re a complete moron.
What I really wanted to see is a low power VIA-based home server from major computer manufacturers, cuz in India I cannot expect to see any VIA PC otherwise..