Calxeda Announces New Fabric-based Platform for Clouds

Adds pin-compatible 64-bit SoC to its roadmap.

Austin, TX -- October 28, 2013 -- Calxeda, the leader of ARM® -based servers, today announced its second-generation product line, the EnergyCore® ECX-2000 family, targeting the fast-growing private cloud infrastructure market. The new Server-on-a-Chip (SoC) enables an integrated fabric of high-density servers and storage, and has been selected by HP for Moonshot solutions. The ECX-2000 uses standard ARM Cortex™-A15 cores up to 1.8 GHz, with the integrated Calxeda Fleet Fabric™, 10Gb Ethernet and standard I/O controllers. 

The Calxeda architecture is ideal for I/O-intensive applications such as distributed storage, cloud-based gaming services, media streaming and throughput-oriented private clouds. The new SoC delivers up to twice the performance, four times the memory capacity, and three times the memory bandwidth than previous ARM-based servers. The company will demonstrate the new product with OpenStack and the open-source Ceph distributed object storage software at the annual ARM TechCon event at the Santa Clara Convention Center, October 29-31.

"The rate and pace of innovation we have seen in the mobile space, enabled by power-efficient ARM-based SoCs, is now taking place in the datacenter," said Barry Evans, CEO and co-founder of Calxeda. "The Calxeda Fleet Fabric enables our customers to create an extremely efficient computing infrastructure that improves management of large-scale clouds at lower cost, lower power and reduced carbon footprint. Coupled with the strength of our software and hardware partners, this is an unbeatable combination in an industry that is demanding better alternatives."

The ECX-2000 enables the first production-class cloud infrastructure based on ARM processors, and is the first to support KVM and Xen, the popular virtualization hypervisors. Canonical, the leader in scalable cloud computing system software, is officially certifying the ECX-2000 for Ubuntu 13.10, including the latest "Havana" OpenStack release.

"HP is working with Calxeda to deliver new infrastructure economics to our customers and we are excited about their new EnergyCore ECX-2000 processor," said Paul Santeler, vice president and general manager of HP’s Hyperscale Business Unit. "When delivered in an HP Moonshot solution, we believe it will offer users a new level of performance, requiring less energy and less space than traditional solutions do today."

Calxeda expects volume shipments to system vendors before the end of the year, and has been sampling the ECX-2000 to partners and datacenters, including Dreamhost, an innovative cloud service and hosting company that hosts over 1.3 million Internet domains. "We are really impressed with the performance and low-power footprint of the Calxeda-based storage solution," said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost. "After extensive testing of the new product, we see great potential for Calxeda in our OpenStack-based public cloud deployments and Ceph-based distributed object storage service."

In addition to HP, notable solution partners building servers and storage appliances using the new SoC include Aaeon, Boston Ltd. and Penguin Computing, with systems available beginning later this year.

Calxeda also announced the addition of a second 64-bit SoC to the company roadmap announced last year. Code-named "Sarita," the new 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 SoC complements the "Lago" platform, but is pin-compatible with the ECX-1000 and new ECX-2000. This approach, a first in the industry, reduces development time and expense for Calxeda partners, accelerating the 64-bit ARM ecosystem, and enabling customers to future-proof designs for three generations of rapid technology innovation.

About Calxeda

Founded in January 2008, Calxeda brings new performance density to the datacenter with revolutionary server-on-a-chip technology. Calxeda is funded by a unique syndicate comprising industry leading venture capital firms and semiconductor innovators, including ARM Holdings, Advanced Technology Investment Company, Austin Ventures, Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners and Vulcan Capital. See http://www.calxeda.com for more information.