New-Tech Europe | April 2016 | Digital edition

I mentioned above. Various higher levels of the stack, such as openstack, are available. ARM servers require standards to take off. They need to "just work" the way that Intel-based servers do today, out of the box. Unbox, plug into rack, provision via the network. In short, give the users a phenomenally "boring" experience. To wrap up Jon talked about what not to do, and then what you should do: • Don't ship some hack with your custom hacked-up distribution and kernel of the day • Don't ship special "OS" that has no upgrade path • Do ship a standards-compliant platform upon which the user can install the OS of their choice • Do have a great plan for deploying firmware updates, documentation, overall user experience • In short, standards, standards, standards Jon pointed out one great example of what you should do: the Qualcomm Software Development Platform. The engineering is phenomenal and Red Hat (and presumably Jon himself) have found them a pleasure to work with. The trick is to make using an ARMv8 server as boring and uneventful as using an Intel-based server, and ensure that whatever

Jon Masters, the chief ARM architect

In fact, a lot of software runs at even higher levels. For example, all big data runs on top of the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), meaning that it is insulated from the underlying architecture. There are already two good JVM implementations on ARM (OpenJDK and Oracle). Migration to the cloud, with the hundreds of thousands of servers typically involved, means that it starts to be economical to invest in customized designs. In fact, Intel does this themselves already, with semi-custom Xeon designs that public clouds such as Amazon run today. Jon reckons that 20% better price/ performance is enough to justify the move, although in the panel session later in the day people thought 2X was more compelling. The fastest growth market for data center solutions is the Chinese domestic market. Just like in the US where we have Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and more, they have Baidu (search), Alibaba (shopping) and Tencent (social media). But demand exists for locally developed

technologies government pressure may change to mandate). Since ARM is an IP company, it is easier to build a local-content ARM server than a local-content x86 server. Jon said that there are many serious proof-of-concept projects in flight with lots of rumors around the big public clouds (such as the Google/ Qualcomm one). Server silicon is now available from AppliedMicro, Broadcom, Cavium, Qualcomm, HiSilicon and AMD. A large number of operating systems, not just Red Hat, are available. Hypervisors such as Xen are available. JVMs are available, as (and

software you need "just runs." We can only wait and see now.

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