HP to open lab to allow customer access to ARM servers

PanARMENIAN.Net - Hewlett-Packard will open a lab in the second quarter where select customers will be able to play around with its first low-power server based on an ARM processor, a company executive said this week.

Early access customers will be able to start testing and benchmarking the proof-of-concept server, which will be part of a family of low-power servers being developed by HP under a new platform dubbed the Redstone Server Development Platform.

The Redstone platform was unveiled in November when HP first announced it was developing servers using ARM-based processors. HP at the time said the experimental servers would be made available to select customers in the first half of this year.

"The development platforms are still on track," said Mark Potter, HP senior vice president and general manager of Industry Standard Servers, in an interview at HP's Global Partner conference in Las Vegas.

HP still isn't saying when the ARM servers will be commercially available.

HP is targeting the servers at Web companies looking for energy-efficient servers to quickly process high volumes of online transactions. ARM processors are mainly found in smartphones and tablets, but there is growing interest in building servers with a collection of low-power processors as companies look to curb power costs. Nvidia is building an experimental supercomputer that marries ARM CPUs with its graphics processors, and analysts say ARM servers could be widely used in data centers by 2013, IDG News Service reported.