4 Reasons The Calxeda Shutdown Isn’t Surprising

The board of Calxeda, the company trying to bring low-power ARM CPUs to the server market, has voted to cease operations in the wake of a failed round of financing. This is completely unsurprising to me, for a few different reasons. Virtualization is more suited to the needs of IT Calxeda’s view of the world …

A Look at the HP Moonshot 1500

Last week HP announced their “second generation” HP Moonshot 1500 enclosure and Intel Atom S1260-based Proliant Moonshot systems, a high-density computing solution targeted at hyperscale computing workloads. They’re billing it as the first “software defined server” and claiming that it can save 89 percent of energy, 80 percent space, and 77 percent of the cost of their DL380 servers.

Xen port to ARM puts pressure on VMware

Stefano Stabellini, a senior software engineer at Citrix Systems, has announced a proof of concept port of the open source Xen Hypervisor for the ARM Cortex A15 processor. The project was started in early November and has already developed to the point where it is capable of booting a Linux 3.0 based virtual machine up to a shell prompt. The Xen port has progressed so rapidly due to a decision to take advantage of the virtualization features that were introduced with the ARMv7 architecture making it small and comparatively easy to develop. However, because of this it won’t be able to run on anything older than a Cortex-A15 processor.