I wonder how the performance compares to say the scaleway[0] offerings, I would guess the SD card storage doesn't compare favourably.
Given that there are 6eur/mo one core intel dedis[1][2] and 16eur/mo 8core with 8gig ram and vastly more disk space[3], these seem a bit expensive.
[0] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/ [1] http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/index.xml [2] http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-scg2 [3] http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedibox-xc
Using real SSDs on a real SATA channel makes an immense difference, not just in performance but also in system stability. SD cards are meant to be linearly loaded up with files, dumped to disk, then erased. They do not handle highly random write loads with sectors of extreme write intensity very well, their wear levelling is very minimal and sooner or later you will burn them out if you're not careful. The typical way around this is using a write-protected SD card for bootstrapping (if necessary). You load a minimal driver stub, and then you either boot from a USB stick or you do a PXE boot from an image on the network.
USB 2.0 is way too limited to handle your entire system disk+network traffic+data disk load. You want USB 3.0 at a minimum if your computer is set up like that.
If you just want something real minimal maybe the SD card options are OK, but I highly, highly recommend a SSD-based system if you can swing it at all. If you're not going to see a ton of traffic, maybe you could build it out once and run it on your corporate network? That could be more appealing than a hosted or colo'd solution, depending on the task.
Just allow people to use a normal 2.5" SSD or even m2 and you have a really nice machine!
For example, the latest Raspberry Pi 2 has a quad-core CPU which is faster than my 1st machine (and maybe even my 2nd and 3rd) but is severly handicaped by the IO speed which is limited to USB (plus, all the USB ports and Ethernet using the same controller for extra slowness).
A quad-core ARM with a RAM slot supporting at least 8GB, a giga Ethernet port, 4 separate USB ports and a SATA connection would be glorious.
To the extent these sorts of boards use CPUs that are cheap because they are made in high volume for other applications, we'll continue to suffer from IO limitations for what we want.
There exist some designs with real SATA (eg. Cubietruck) but those have poor CPUs (A7), and there exist many designs with SATA-via-USB which is never going to be fast. Also micro SD cards have abysmal performance for the sort of random I/O that operating system root filesystems have.
Luckily the situation in 64 bit ARM server land is much better. The APM Mustang and AMD designs have a combination of fast cores and properly engineered I/O subsystems. Real SATA, multiple 10gigE and 1gigE interfaces, PCIe, etc.
64-bit is better because there are SoCs directly targeting server usecases which therefore have the kind of peripherals you'd prefer to see in devboards.
Specific models are the ODroid XU4, the CubieBoard or Cubietruck, the Banana Pi, etc.
They're not cheap, but the Jetson TK1 is an extremely powerful offering for this category based on the Tegra K1 SoC. You get SATA, USB 3.0, mPCIE, 1GigE, GPU with 192 Kepler cores, etc. If you need some grunt you can even do CUDA compute. Again, I'm still waiting for my Tegra-X1 based Jetson, NVIDIA :<
What would be really interesting is if ARM introduces a way to use a high speed serial bus (think PCIe) which would allow for the development of a 'south bridge' type IO chipset for ARM machines.
(Edited to add) Incidentally, most of the above are designed to have more than 8 cores. Cavium's ThunderX has 48, for example. Both Cavium and Broadcom previously delivered many-core MIPs designes, so this isn't vaporware either.
The ODROID XU4 (referenced specifically by this link) has much better I/O throughput than Pi 2. It's still pretty affordable, too (75-80 USD).
> supporting at least 8GB
This is less common, but I figure it should arrive within 12-18 months.
The Allwinner A80 seems a step backwards to me as they don't seem to have included SATA, though you would be able to address 8GB of DRAM.
If it had been 64 bit ARM with a real amount of RAM and an SSD then it might be more interesting. Even there (and I say this as someone who has an APM Mustang under my desk), it's more likely of benefit to people hosting web servers at scale than for VPS.
Well, yes, but I was hoping someone would put it more eloquently, so thanks :)
I can't see what the target market is. The I/O is going to be terrible for hosting files. And 32-bit ARM is at a disadvantage for anything more computationally intensive (as you pointed out).
Maybe there's a group of users out there who have been thinking for years: "If only I could have my old smartphone colocated in a data center"...?
People whose web pages generate a lot of traffic (10TB allowed) with low CPU usage, i.e. static pages and similar.
I am guessing that any job that is not CPU or memory hungry would fit the bill. Like crawling, sending a massive amount of emails, simple text processing, maybe even as a RabbitMQ server.
What holds it back is the I/O (though I haven't tried using eMMC, which is probably a huge improvement) and driver issues, especially around graphics (the never-ending problem with ARM SoCs).
You can hate on it all you want, but this is simply a unique offering.
Simmilar setup with 2GB RAM goes for 19 GBP on 1on1 in the UK
HP ProLiant DL120 with a Dual Core Xeon 4GB of RAM and 2TB storage goes for 29 Euro's on Leaseweb...
Is it 16? nope, but don't even compare 16 Euro's for a didcated cell phone with no storage, no IO and very poor performance is like leasing a TI calculator as a compute cloud....
online.net will sell you an x64 server for as low as 6e/m, and with scaleway you can get an ARM server with a significantly better storage story for 10e/m.
There are a myriad of low-cost dedicated server providers in this price range that are not selling SD cards and other consumer hardware.
There's performance concerns as well, but those don't really apply for ARM as obviously you can do better.
Colo can be even cheaper, but it needs additional skills, and more upfront money investment. It's a whole different world.
