Web hosting provider Online, a wholly-owned subsidiary of French telecom company Iliad Group, announced the commercial deployment of server platforms based on Cavium’s ThunderX workload-optimised processors as part of its Scaleway cloud service offering.
Online offers a range of services to Internet customers worldwide including domain names, web hosting, dedicated servers and hosting in its data centre, and with several hundred thousand servers deployed is one of the largest web hosting providers in Europe.
For the deployment, Online is using dual socket, 96 core ThunderX based platforms as part of the Scaleway IaaS cloud offering. The Scaleway cloud platform is supported by Ubuntu 16.04 OS, including LAMP stack, Docker, Puppet, Juju, Hadoop and MAAS, and also provides support for standard features of the Scaleway cloud including flexible IPs, native IPv6, Snapshots and images.
Cavium’s ThunderX products offer a 64-bit ARMv8-A based server processor designed for data centre and cloud applications. The devices feature custom cores, single and dual socket configurations, and high memory bandwidth and memory capacity. The products also include hardware accelerators, integrated high bandwidth network and storage IO, virtualised core and IO functionality and a scalable high bandwidth, low latency Ethernet fabric.
ThunderX products are compliant with ARMv8-A architecture specifications, as well as with ARM’s SBSA and SBBR standards, and supported by major OS, hypervisor and software tool and application vendors.
Earlier in the year, Cavium announced it was collaborating with Microsoft to evaluate and enable a range of cloud workloads running on its flagship ThunderX2 ARMv8-A data centre processor for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
As part of the partnership, the companies demonstrated web services on a version of Windows Server developed for Microsoft’s internal use running cloud services workloads on ThunderX2. The server platform was based on Microsoft Project Olympus open source, hyper-scale cloud hardware design.
