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-now-do-facebook-server-management/ -- 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