This message is intended as follow-up to this thread: https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2015-September/013792.html
Rackspace is building a POWER8 based OpenPOWER server, in an Open Compute form factor. Its codename is Barreleye. Specs and target use cases are as follows:
Specs:
* CPU / Memory
o 2 sockets
o 32 DIMM slots
o 8 Centaurs
* IO
o 2 x8 OCP Mezzanine slots
o 1 x16 FHFL PCI-E slot
o 1 x8 HHFL PCI-E slot
o 1 x8 HHHL PCI-E slot
* Storage
o Systems are currently using LSI / Avago 3108 ROCs (9361-8i), but could support other ROCs
o LSI / Avago SAS Expander
o 15 x2.5" hot swap drives
o 1 internal M.2 SATA card slot
* BMC
o AST2400 Chip, with internal development targeting OpenBMC
? More here: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/08/14/facebooks-openbmc-can... -- there's similar, collaborative work going on for Barreleye.
There's a picture of a Barreleye rack, at Rackspace, here: https://twitter.com/Calista_Redmond/status/636367178355245056/photo/1
Use cases:
* OpenStack with KVM (for an IaaS platform)
* Container Platform (LXC, Docker, etc)
* Bare metal host for popular applications like LAMP, Nginx, Wordpress, Go environments, and so forth
* Big data apps starting with Mongo, but also including Cassandra, Redis, Hadoop, and Spark
* CAPI accelerator environments
We believe demand for POWER-based CentOS will be similar to our x86 demand (which is to say, significant). We hope to see it get to launch-grade quality for at least virtual machines, if not bare metal, over the next few months.
--Aaron
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