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  • ant6n - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    I wonder whether it's possible to run this with a geforce or radeon in ubuntu.
  • Soulkeeper - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    with some effort, any distro targetting arm could work.
    although the games/binaries you run will need to support arm

    I'm actually pretty impressed by this, even tho it's only 40nm
  • geekfool - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    your probably better off waiting for the "Cavium" Support for NVIDIA GPU Accelerators in their 64-bit ARMv8-A ThunderX Processor Family if you want to use a GPU as a co-processor etc.
  • Gigaplex - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    Does NVIDIA even have a GeForce driver blob for ARM?
  • Samus - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    You would think they would, being an ARM licensee and being on their 5th gen Tegra SoC...
    But we are talking two different divisions that rarely cross paths within NVidia.
  • Azurael - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link

    I would imagine it would work so long as the card is supported by Nouveau. I've run newer Nvidia (and AMD, for that matter) cards in PPC64 machines. Obviously you don't get the full functionality of the binary blobs, but especially in the case of Radeons, the binary drivers are an unstable POS even on a machine on which they are 'supposed' to work so it's no great loss.
  • dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    What are those WD drives in the server O_O? They look like Black's, but that lineup currently tops out at 4TB. Actually I can't find a 6.3TB drive in any of WD's lineups. Unannounced product leak?
  • WithoutWeakness - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    They're likely Ae series drives. An appliance like this would likely use Re, Se, or Ae series drives rather than WD Blacks or other consumer-oriented drives as they're better suited and designed for large arrays like this in large enclosures. The Ae series is designed for low power consumption and long-term "archive" storage.

    Plus I checked the product page and they have a photo of a bunch of drives labeled 6.3TB in a server that looks very similar to the one above: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=13...
  • dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    Ya you're right. I just looked at the Black, Re, and Se lineups and assumed that nothing else that might go into a large array server existed. I guess the Black's wouldn't work for that either. I haven't even heard of the Ae until now. It's interesting that it's the only lineup with a 6.3TB capacity.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    Yup. FYI. There're tow major technical reasons why consumer grade drives don't belong in large storage servers. the first is firmware that keeps triying to read a bad sector for so long before giving up that raid controllers will decide the entire drive has failed. When it's your only copy of date, 10 second of hail mary attempts before giving up is a good thing since occasionally it will manage to get a good read eventually (and then remap the sector out of use); in a raid array you want a rapid failure so that redundancy features can quickly get the data from an alternate location. The other issue is vibration tolerance; server grade drives are built to handle vibration loads that end up rapidly killing cheaper consumer drives. Lastly, while not really a technical issue, drives marketed at the enterprise will have better warranties: Longer lasting, faster replacement after a failure, (for SSDs: a higher guaranteed write limit) etc.
  • Samus - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    The Ae drives are certified for 16-bay storage arrays (vibration) although mechanically they look like the Re/Black (which have the spindle locked at both axis') so the difference likely comes down to firmware and perhaps an additional sensor.
  • patrickjp93 - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link

    Funny, because Google only uses consumer-grade drives in its data centers. --Dr. Keith Fricken, Google DBA
  • andychow - Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - link

    Yes, but Google uses their own distributed file system. It's not raid 6. It's like ZFS-3, self-healing, on steroids. They could lose a whole lot of disks and not lose any data. They can do this because they are massive. Most businesses don't have tons of clusters with thousands of disks on hundreds of servers. They don't say how many servers they have for data, but estimates place the number in the hundreds of thousands.

    Also, it's not that fast: "when used with relatively small number of servers (15), the file system achieves reading performance comparable to that of a single disk (80–100 MB/s), but has a reduced write performance (30 MB/s), and is relatively slow (5 MB/s) in appending data to existing files."
  • ruthan - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link

    Hmm, i wanna see some benchmarks and some real ARM Linux, because i far as know, there is some arm Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, but feature list is pretty much limited in comparison to x86 version.
  • KellyC82 - Saturday, March 28, 2015 - link

    >but feature list is pretty much limited in comparison to x86 version.

    Not really. My Debian Stable armhf system right now shows about 300 installed packages and about 41,800 available. My Debian testing AMD64 + i386 as a foreign arch has some 68,000 total packages (not double what one arch would have, since some are arch independent).

    armhf has 157 packages in database. 1148 in java. 397 in mail. 1666 in net and 1123 in web.

    Pretty much the entire Gnome and KDE desktops are there, if you want to talk desktops.
  • nonotme - Wednesday, March 25, 2015 - link

    I'd really like an armv8 server but:
    Slower than Avington
    Hotter than Avington
    Is it cheaper than Avington?

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