by Angela Guess
According to a recent article, “HP unveiled a major shift in its datacenter strategy, announcing that it would begin to build what it calls ‘extreme low-power servers’ based on chips that were originally designed for phones, tablets, and netbooks.” The announcement is part of HP’s Project Moonshot: “Project Moonshot has three main components, or what HP called ‘three key pillars.’ The first of these components is the Redstone server development platform, which is what HP unveiled today (literally—the HP presenter pulled a cloak off of it).”
It continues, “What was shown today was a non-functional prototype. (I confirmed that the prototype on display was non-functional by talking to the CEO of Calxeda; to make it functional you’ll have to run a bunch of SATA ribbons from each of the EnergyCard modules to each of the SATA hard drive modules, because Calxeda’s proprietary board interface doesn’t carry SATA traffic.) This Calxeda-made, ARM-based prototype is only the first system that HP will launch, making it available to customers in the second quarter of 2011. x86-based Redstone systems are definitely on the roadmap, and an HP exec confirmed that a forthcoming version of Redstone will feature Intel’s Atom processors.”
It goes on, “The second component of Moonshot: Project Pathfinder. Pathfinder is a group of HP partners who are going to be helping HP develop an ecosystem around Moonshot. Right now, Pathfinder includes Red Hat, Calxeda, Canonical, AMD, and ARM. There was no one from Red Hat at the event, so my colleague Bob McMillan couldn’t get anyone to confirm that there will be an ARM port of RHEL, but it seems likely that this is in the works. Needless to say, Canonical is all over this, and will be aggressively upping support for ARM in the next LTS release of Ubuntu, which is 12.04.”
