Where to Buy an Arm Server

Being Arm enthusiasts and deeply embedded in the Arm Server ecosystem, one of the questions we get asked often is,

“Where can I buy an Arm Server?”

In the past, it was difficult to actually find Arm Server hardware available to individual end-users. Not long ago, the only way to gain access to Arm Servers was to have NDA’s with major OEM’s or having the right connections to get engineering-sample hardware. However, over the course of the past 2 to 3 years, more providers have entered the market and hardware is now readily available to end users and customers. Here are some of the easiest ways to buy an Arm Server, although this list is not exhaustive. These servers all have great performance and are well supported thanks to standards compliance and UEFI.

First up is the Marvell ThunderX, and newer ThunderX2. These chips are sold in servers from several vendors, which come in various shapes and sizes. Some of the examples we’ve found include the Avantek R-series in both 1U and 2U sizes, and the Gigabyte Arm offering that closely match Avantek’s specs. There are High Density designs, single processor and dual processor options, and 10 GBE as well as SFP options available.  ThunderX2’s have been more popular in HPC environments, but even a first-generation ThunderX is a great choice, and still a very powerful machine.  They can be purchased with up to 48-cores, or in dual-processor configurations then containing up to 96 cores.

Another option is the Ampere eMag Arm Server from a company that formed a few  years ago, Ampere Computing.  They ship a turnkey Arm Server that is sold by Lenovo, the HR330A or the HR350A.  Their first-generation platform has 32 Arm cores running at 3.0ghz, 42 lanes of PCIe bandwidth, and 1 TB of memory capacity, and their second-generation product, the Ampere Altra, has up to 80 Arm Neoverse N1 cores.  Current models are available for purchase from their website, or through Lenovo.

Finally, although it is marketed as a workstation, the Solid Run Honeycomb LX2 motherboard can quite easily be repurposed as a proper server.  With 16x A72 cores, support for 64gb of RAM, up to 40gb Ethernet, and PCIe expansion, it can definitely handle medium sized workloads.  It is standards-compliant, making it easy to install your OS of choice, and affordable, thus its a great option for getting started on Arm.

And of course, if buying physical servers and hosting them yourself, or placing them in a datacenter, is not feasible or cost effective in your situation, then our hosted Arm servers are a great option as well!  Our miniNodes Arm servers are certainly more modest in comparison to those mentioned above, but, they are a great way to get started with Arm development, testing existing code for compatibility, or lighter workloads that don’t require quite so much compute capability.

Be sure to check back often for all things Arm Server related!