The anti-Wintel
Back in August 2010, ARM, TI and ATIC announced they were investing in a new chip-maker - Smooth-Stone - that was not only looking to take on Intel and AMD in the server processor space, but will do so with chips based on the ARM micro architecture.
Since then Smooth-Stone has changed its name to the latinization: Calxeda, but other than that has been reasonably quiet. That changed today with the announcement of the Trailblazer Initiative, which a founding member group of software companies focused on cloud computing and other ‘big data' solutions.
You can see the full list from Calxeda below, but perhaps the most interesting member is Canonical. This is the commercial backer of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, and its presence confirms Ubuntu as the default operating system for Calxeda servers. How much more anti-Wintel can you get?
- Autonomic Resources, a US Government cloud provider
- Canonical, the Ubuntu sponsor
- Caringo, a Cloud Storage Software leader
- Couchbase, the simple, fast, elastic NoSQL Database Company
- Datastax, provider of Enterprise Cassandra and Hadoop support solutions and products
- Eucalyptus Systems, with its on-premise cloud computing software platform
- Gluster's open source scalable storage software
- Momentum SI, the IT Transformation Services leader
- Opscode, a leader in Cloud Infrastructure Automation
- Pervasive, with its Datarush big data preparation and analytics accelerator
"We see Trailblazer as a critical step in the evolution of this marketplace, and are thrilled by the support we are receiving from the community to help it materialize," said Barry Evans, Calxeda CEO. "The datacenter energy crisis is real, and the faster we can help our system vendors and partners get complete solutions in our customers' hands, the faster we can help them save money, and reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint."
"We are proud that Ubuntu has been chosen as the operating system to launch the Calxeda Trailblazer Initiative," said Canonical CEO Jane Silber. "We have been working with Calxeda and have been developing Ubuntu Server to run on ARM servers for some time now. This program further aligns our organisations and will help companies and projects looking to build the hyper-efficient datacentres of tomorrow."
