Boston Viridis Servers With Calxeda EnergyCore® Accelerate Application Development and Lower Barrier for Porting and Supporting ARM Software Ecosystem for the Fedora Project

St Albans, UK, May 16, 2013 – Boston, a leader in the low power server market, today announced the deployment of Boston Ltd. Viridis servers embedded with Calxeda EnergyCore® chips for the Fedora Project. The availability of the Calxeda-based server cluster is a critical step in helping the Fedora community enable ARM into a primary architecture. This installation, the first enterprise/server-class ARM servers deployed for the ARM port of Fedora, is targeted at the project’s software build infrastructure and accelerates the ability to target the ARM architecture, something the community sees as an emerging industry trend for datacenters in this era of ultra-efficient servers.

“It is nice to see the impact of ARM-based production servers on the Fedora Project,” said Robyn Bergeron, Fedora Project leader, Red Hat. ”The new hardware, and help from Calxeda, Red Hat and other Linaro Enterprise Group members, will facilitate ongoing development of Fedora for the ARM architecture.”

Earlier this year, the Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, announced the availability of Fedora 18, the latest version of its free, open source operating system distribution. Among new ARM architecture-specific features added to Fedora 18 is support for industry standards such as Pre-boot Execution Environment (PXE-boot) technology, a method that is frequently used in datacenter automation to simplify operating system installation on servers. That feature was heavily leveraged by the Fedora Project while deploying the cluster of four high-density Calxeda-powered Viridis systems (each with 24 servers inside).

For the deployment, the Fedora Project migrated off of old infrastructure to the Calxeda-based server cluster which enabled physical consolidation of multiple generations of developer boards into a uniform server environment for the ongoing build and validation activities of the project. This deployment of ARM servers is the first time the Fedora community has been able to use the standard deployment tools like PXE and Kickstart on an ARM system. Since deployment into production, the performance and reliability of the new hardware continues to deliver impressive performance, accelerating application development, and lowering the barrier for porting and supporting the ARM software ecosystem.

“We are thrilled to have been chosen as the launching pad for accelerating ARM into a primary Fedora architecture. The Fedora Project team’s experience – from install to deployment to production – is a testament to compatibility of Linux code on Calxeda: it just works,” said Karl Freund, Vice President, Marketing, Calxeda. “That is what datacenters will expect and demand from ARM platforms, and we plan to deliver.”

We are delighted to announce that Boston’s ARM®-based Viridis server has been awarded ‘One To Watch Product’ at the fourth annual Green IT Awards! The ceremony took place last night at the Grand Connaught Hotel in London in front 150 professionals from a range of organisations involved in the green IT and energy efficiency arenas.

The Boston Viridis, which started life in November 2011 as a concept for a revolutionary low power server designed to rival the traditional x86 server, was officially launched in June 2012. Upon it’s unveiling at ISC 2012 in Germany it became the world’s first ultra-low power server to harness the CPU technology of ARM Holdings – whose processors are synonymous with consumer electronics, mobile devices and tablets.

Now nearly a year on from its launch the innovative server has been awarded the Green IT Magazine ‘One To Watch Product’, beating competition from Cannon Technologies Ltd and Nimbus Data Systems.

Congratulations to everyone involved for this fantastic achievement!