Industry News From The Land Of Oles: ARM v8 Cloud Servers, $2.99/2GB SSD KVM/OpenStack

[DomainBop]

RunAbove news:
 
ThunderX ARMv8 powered cloud servers coming in August:
 

OVH.com, the world's third largest Internet Hosting Company announced the world's first ARMv8 based public cloud for scalable compute and storage powered by Cavium's (NASDAQ: CAVM) flagship 48 core 64-bit ARMv8-A ThunderX workload optimized processor...

...Cavium's ThunderX processors provide an ideal building block for RunAbove public cloud. RunAbove ThunderX customers benefit from the fine-grained control of a large number of cores, integrated standard low latency Ethernet fabric, 10/40/100 GbE networking, end-to-end virtualization enabled through virtSoC™ technology, and powerful integrated accelerators for packet processing, security, deep packet inspection and virtualization. OVH will leverage both ThunderX_CP and ThunderX_ST workload optimized processor SKUs to deliver fast and scalable compute and storage services seamlessly provisioned by OpenStack ™...

 
full press release: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ovhcom-launches-worlds-first-armv8-based-public-cloud-powered-by-caviums-thunderx-workload-optimized-processors-300111952.html
 
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OVH VPS news:
 
OpenVZ is out and 2.99euro 2GB RAM SSD KVM/OpenStack powered VPS's are in (available on OVH.fr now, all global sites soon) http://www.ovh.com/fr/vps/ <--performance, power, and reliability of new KVM/OpenStack lineup is reportedly much improved over the old slabbed openvz offerings (performance for the 2.99 line should be about the same as the RunAbove Sandbox line).

The 2.99+ "VPS" offerings use Raid10 SSD local storage, the premium 7.99+ "Cloud" offerings use CEPH and have an SLA
 
negative effects for those of you who call yourselves providers :
1. more downward pricing pressure on VPS/"cloud" offerings and more pressure to implement "cloud"-like features
2. the dying breed of low end OVZ overloaders like bluevm/123systems/GVH etc will have even more trouble competing for customers and staying afloat (DO, Vultr, and the emergence of several good lower priced providers have been driving nails into these craproviders coffins for the past 2 years so really nothing new)

 

[drmike]

OVH is saying: "RunAbove Cloud services powered by ThunderX will be available in early Aug 2015."

I remember seeing Cavium gear, but not actual running environment:

https://youtu.be/v0roWWx7N4I?t=50s

ATX form factor board for ThunderX:

They claim Ubuntu + Xen and KVM compatible out of box.

What's more interesting to me is their security co-processor for offloading crypto.  ThunderX allegedly bundles this co-processor.

Problem remains that ARM has limited software support all over town and self compile and getting things to work is truly always a PITA.  So unless the pre-test / pre-recommend and maybe pre-ship solution stacks, customers are going to be left in various states of fail and issues on the software layer.  End customers working with such are going to be more than frustrated unless somehow this is all x86/x64 compatible and not using the ARM tree.

I like ARM-based computing and have for a long time.  But OVH to general customers.... Unsure what they've cooked in to patch up obvious pitfalls of ARM.... if they haven't.... whee.

As for OVH $2.99 VPS offer... Pfft.  OVH VPS packages have been rather unreliable to say the least.  Plus OVH remains a SEND US YOUR PAPERS COMRADE sort of place for services.  Ideally in today's world more folks realize such is a stupid idea.

Cavium is certainly an interesting company.  Now to see some real world use and test results from one of their boxes.

 

[DomainBop]

Problem remains that ARM has limited software support all over town and self compile and getting things to work is truly always a PITA.

 The compatibility and PITA aspects are why I decided not to use Online.net's Scaleway ARM offering in production.   OVH has the resources that it can launch cloud products that only cater to a small subset of users (like their Power8 offerings) which is what I suspect this will be.  

As for OVH $2.99 VPS offer... Pfft.  OVH VPS packages have been rather unreliable to say the least.

Their slabbed OpenVZ packages were unreliable but the new OpenStack offerings will be using the same software stack/infrastructure as their RunAbove offerings which have been rock solid during the almost 1 yr I've been using them.  

Customer service for this new lineup will continue to be standard OVH however (i.e. 9 times out of 10 it will be slow, substandard...suck) so smaller providers can still compete with OVH (as they have been) by offering superior support and assistance to those who need hand holding. Hiring competent support staff doesn't come cheap so most smaller providers likely be unable to improve their margins and/or afford to continue to provide the same level of support if the larger players continue to drive down prices for an extended period of time.

OVH (and Hetzner too) is a provider I would only recommend to people who are very experienced server administrators (which means the average summer host and a large percentage of the hosts I see posting offers on WHT/LET should avoid them at all costs).  If you know what you're doing you'll probably never (or rarely) need to contact OVH's support (in the past 3+ years I've opened 2 tickets and both were billing/account related...nothing server related) but if you don't know what you're doing you're screwed (and so are your customers if you're a provider) and there is a long list of deadpooled providers whose fatal mistake was signing up with OVH.

TL;DR the crap will be weeded out by the "big boys" pricing wars, good providers should do OK, shrinking margins make entry into the VPS/cloud market less attractive to newcomers