HP to build low-power servers

Hewlett-Packard (HP) plans to make computer servers using low-energy processors based on ARM Holdings' designs, BBC reports.

HP said the equipment would be cheaper to run than current alternatives.

According to PCWorld, the servers use a 32-bit processor from ARM licensee Calxeda, and are aimed at Web giants such as Yahoo and Facebook, as well as other companies running large-scale cloud applications for tasks like data analysis, Web serving and content delivery.

HP's server design packs 288 Calxeda chips into a 4U rack-mount server, or 2 800 in a full rack, with a shared power, cooling and management infrastructure. By eliminating much of the cabling and switching devices used in traditional servers, and using the low-power ARM processors, HP says it can reduce both power and space requirements dramatically.

"We saw all the stars aligning years ago, Web 2.0 data-driven businesses, cloud computing, open source technologies, energy capacity at crisis levels," ZDNet quotes Barry Evans, CEO of Calxeda, as saying.

"We knew the era of thousands of archaic servers filling enormous data centres was coming to an end, and today, we make public the foundational architecture for this new era of scale-out server infrastructure."