[HN Gopher] Hetzner to Offer First Arm-Based Dedicated Servers i...
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Hetzner to Offer First Arm-Based Dedicated Servers in Europe
Author : dx034
Score : 222 points
Date : 2022-07-20 11:37 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hetzner.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hetzner.com)
| dboreham wrote:
| > features the first Arm-based dedicated servers in Europe
|
| Not sure in what context these are "first" but Equinix Metal has
| had ARM servers for...definitely many years.
|
| https://metal.equinix.com/product/servers/c3-large-arm64/
| johnklos wrote:
| Misleading title. "Hetzner to offer *their* first ARM-based"...
| layer8 wrote:
| Who else already offers dedicated ARM-based servers in Europe?
| Just curious.
|
| Edit: ...except Hetzner themselves who already did in 2015 as
| noted upthread.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| There have been various hosting services that have hosted
| Raspberry Pi units - some of them even did this for free. I
| submit this in the best HN spirit of technically-correct.
| layer8 wrote:
| The best kind of correct. ;)
| maeln wrote:
| Scaleway / Online.net
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Equinix Metal does with 1-y commit
| dboreham wrote:
| This page says on-demand is an option:
| https://metal.equinix.com/product/servers/c3-large-arm64/
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Maybe if you ask support, i just went to console and
| ondemand not showing arm in europe
| openplatypus wrote:
| OVH, Scaleway
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| Scaleway did. It was some Marvell Armada SoC IIRC.
| JeanMarcS wrote:
| >cat /proc/cpuinfo
|
| >processor : 0
|
| >model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l)
|
| This is on a server I have at OVH (SoYouStart to be accurate)
| from july 2018
| up6w6 wrote:
| A comparison between the mentioned Ampere Altra Q80-30 and AWS
| Graviton2:
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/arms-race-ampere-altra-takes-on-...
|
| A similar instance to the RX220 at Equinix (bare metal) would
| cost around $1800/month [1]. (8x Hetzner's price)
|
| [1] https://metal.equinix.com/product/servers/c3-large-arm64/
| BonoboIO wrote:
| I m a die hard fan of Hetzner, but well I m biased, I sleek
| German and live in Europe.
|
| Their prices are unmatched and their service is awesome. The
| got Mac Mini M1 Servers as low as 50EUR.
|
| And big dedicated servers. In my company we use 80% hetzner.
| brian_cunnie wrote:
| I'm a die-hard Hetzner fan, too. I have personal servers on
| AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, GCP, and Vultr, but I think my
| Hetzner server is my favorite & provides the biggest bang for
| the buck.
|
| Oh, and I'm American, I speak English, and I live in San
| Francisco.
| spockz wrote:
| I would like to get just a few cores. No need for 80 cores at
| full time. Primary use case is compiling Java apps to native
| binaries using graalvm.
| nwh5jg56df wrote:
| Can't you cross compile these apps?
| weberer wrote:
| Then wouldn't a VPS be good enough?
| dindresto wrote:
| I am sure a Hetzner Cloud server offering based on this is a
| given, might just have to wait until next year.
| drcongo wrote:
| Hope this filters down to their cloud / VM offerings.
| coredog64 wrote:
| AWS released a1.metal in EU regions in October 2019:
| https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/introduci...
| Youden wrote:
| Those aren't dedicated servers. They use a hypervisor [0].
|
| [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/a1/
| nixgeek wrote:
| Graviton is ARM-based and has offered .metal instances which
| don't have a hypervisor, the latest generation being
| "Graviton 3" (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/join-the-
| preview-amazon-ec2...)
| tecleandor wrote:
| I think there's a1 (virtualized) and a1.metal (bare metal).
| Although I think the metal versions also include Nitro
| hardware.
|
| But not my specialty.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The metal versions use the Nitro card, but run all of the
| virtualization on the Nitro card, so there is no hypervisor
| running on the machine. VMWare has had ESXi doing similar
| virtualization with the help of switches for a while too
| (although I think ESXi still has a tiny hypervisor).
| bogomipz wrote:
| Isn't there still a hypervisor present though but rather
| than the hypervisor running on a general purpose CPU it's
| running on the Nitro chipset? There's still a type 1
| hypervisor involved no? How else would the hypercalls
| from the guests work?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| There are no hypercalls and there is no hypervisor
| software on machines with this type of virtualization.
| All virtualization takes place at the network and storage
| device layer.
|
| The Nitro card encapsulates packets from your machine so
| that they flow on the AWS network correctly, it emulates
| being an SSD, and it takes care of myriad other
| peripherals and interfaces that you might expect to have.
|
| I think it also has a direct connection to the BMC or
| uses IPMI to reboot the machine when you are done with it
| (and another user takes it).
| bogomipz wrote:
| Ah OK, this is helpful, thanks. The IPMI functionality is
| certain nice to have.
| mcspiff wrote:
| There is no hypercalls. Your operating system is running
| directly on the CPU, same as regular bare metal servers.
| Twirrim wrote:
| OCI released A1 Arm based bare metal (BM) and virtual machine
| instances last year too in EU regions, also based on the Ampere
| Altra chips that Hetzner is using.
|
| So Hetzner seems to be way off track with this claim about
| being the first dedicated Arm based servers in Europe.
| nixgeek wrote:
| They might well be the cheapest though that's not the claim.
| Approximately $170 USD per month for a system with a Q80-30
| and 128GiB RAM plus unmetered/unlimited usage of a 1Gbps port
| is substantially less than all the cloud providers, OCI
| included.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Scaleway did it years ago (if you consider dev boards dedicated
| servers), before they had matured into something usable.
| hgazx wrote:
| I had one of these. Performance was atrocious and they were
| generally unreliable.
| Kukumber wrote:
| They are definitely not the first
|
| https://www.ikoula.com/en/dedicated-server/raspberry-pi-4-mi...
|
| Scaleway was the first to offer ARM based servers (non dedicated)
|
| https://blog.scaleway.com/scaleway-become-the-first-arm-base...
| (2015)
| dpedu wrote:
| Hetzner looks like a great service, and I've heard a lot of good
| things about them. They now have a US datacenter however they are
| only offering cloud servers out of it. If they one day offer
| dedicated servers in the 'states you can bet I'd be a customer. I
| am fairly unhappy with OVH's ipv6 situation.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I've been pretty happy with them! I've been using both
| dedicated/cloud since before the jump to the US.
|
| IPv6 with Hetzner is a little weird, but you do get a full /64
| to assign as you see fit.
|
| I can't recall exactly but the SLAAC/DHCPv6 situation seemed a
| little funny. It only matters if you want to configure
| networking differently (eg: change from NetworkManager to
| systemd-networkd)
|
| In doing so you don't benefit from these profile helpers that
| come preinstalled, I think essentially making the cloud server
| its own default gateway (if memory serves)
|
| Anyway, I'm also eagerly awaiting US dedicated. While my
| workloads don't mind the latency to Helsinki, I do
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Wasn't this Scaleway's big launch a decade ago? Funny how the
| world comes full circle eventually...
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Indeed, it was a little buggy but I truly loved it. I spent way
| more than I probably should have on fun tiny-ARM clusters...
| when I was just barely no longer a teenager [and I'm much older
| now]
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| These are heavy processors with 80 cores. Scaleway had entirely
| different proposal, more like RPi's stacked or something. I
| haven't seen anything like this before so interesting to see if
| anyone can comment on their performance/stability/etc.
|
| Check the specs here: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-
| rootserver/matrix-rx
| sschueller wrote:
| Yes, although I think they were shared in vms?
| tecleandor wrote:
| Shared disk IIRC, not VMs.
|
| They had 1U servers full of boards connected to a backplane
| (or so it seems) [1], but the storage was shared and
| centralized in a SAN.
|
| https://www.cnx-software.com/2015/04/02/scaleway-provides-
| de...
|
| Edit: Here are some pics for the ARM modules:
| https://www.cnx-software.com/2014/12/30/iliads-online-
| labs-o...
| naniwaduni wrote:
| > They had 1U servers full of boards connected to a
| backplane (or so it seems) [1], but the storage was shared
| and centralized in a SAN.
|
| This bit was pretty horrific and could seriously cramp your
| style trying to do things with those servers, too; you had
| to boot to a provided kernel so they could start up an nbd-
| client in early boot, which for extra fun you could
| accidentally kill while the machine was booted, which would
| probably force a power cycle.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Yep! They launched the C1 servers in 2013 and in 2014 they were
| providing Docker support for them [1]. Of course, those were
| simple and slow chips and these are 80cores Ampere Altra, but
| of course, it's not the first dedicated ARM service in Europe.
|
| Note: IIRC Scaleway had their C1 servers booting from the
| network, not local disk, but still...
|
| 1: https://blog.scaleway.com/docker-on-c1/
| hamburglar wrote:
| OCI sells Arm-based bare metal servers too.
| fanf2 wrote:
| Mythic Beasts have had ARM-based dedicated servers in Europe
| since 2017 (over 5 years ago). They have many Raspberry Pi with
| POE and NAS (no SD cards). (Mythic Beasts also host the Raspberry
| Pi web site.)
|
| https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2017/03/02/hosting-a-webs...
| onphonenow wrote:
| lma21 wrote:
| They should up the network to 10 GBit/s. Given the price and
| specs of those servers, one can build a powerful bare-metal
| cluster there...
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| Would be good if they offer it upfront or as an add-on during
| order
|
| but currently you can request it as referred here
| https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...
| nixgeek wrote:
| Right now the option you'd usually use for 10G to the
| internet doesn't say it supports RX-line servers.
|
| If you search for "10G dedicated uplink" and look in the
| rightmost column it covers what they will support requests
| on.
|
| I've successfully used it on AX and SX many times and I'd be
| happy to see Hetzner also support RX!
| mnd999 wrote:
| Pretty sure mythic beasts has been offering raspberry pi servers
| for some time.
| fariszr wrote:
| Hmm, I expected it to be cheaper. Maybe when they launch a VPS
| based on ARM.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Totally off topic, but why on earth is text selection disabled in
| this page on mobile? I was excited to share an excerpt with my
| team and am just frustrated now.
| tonightstoast wrote:
| That is super odd - I'm wondering if they just messed up some
| CSS. Another win for reader mode I suppose.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Reader mode saves the day :)
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| It's another case of a webpage working better with javascript
| disabled by default. Disabling javascript fixes more websites
| than it breaks.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Here you go.
|
| > RX-Line: Pushing the envelop of parallelization - Hetzner
| Online GmbH
|
| > 19 July 2022
|
| > RX-Line: Pushing the envelop of parallelization
|
| > The new RX-line is now available and features the first Arm-
| based dedicated servers in Europe. The servers house an Ampere
| (r) Altra (r) Q80-30 SoC with Arm64 architecture, which gives
| you 80 cores of single-threaded processing power.
|
| > The new line includes two models. The RX170 is the smaller
| model of the two, but it still comes with 128 GB DDR4
| registered ECC memory modules and 2x 960 GB NVMe SSD at the low
| price of EUR 169 a month and EUR 179 setup fee. The RX220, on
| the other hand, comes with impressive 256 GB DDR4 registered
| ECC memory modules and 2 x 3.84 TB NVMe SSD at the fair price
| of EUR 219 a month and a setup fee of EUR 229.
|
| > Where is the catch, you wonder? Only a few servers are
| currently available. As we work through ramping the supply
| chain for the RX Line, be the first to get an Ampere-based
| server. Over the next few months, expect further announcements
| of improved availability as we scale out this exciting product
| line.
|
| > So what are you waiting for? Order yours now, and start
| saving time and money on your IT infrastructure.
|
| > Check it out now
|
| > All prices excl. VAT.
| miohtama wrote:
| What are the best payloads for these servers? What applications
| can utilise 80 ARM cores well?
| jcuenod wrote:
| crypto miners of course ;)
| freemint wrote:
| I had really great experience using SAT solvers on these
| machines. It was a dual socket 80 core ampere system
| https://twitter.com/Anno0770/status/1527414408242155523?t=AV...
| .
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Several low end providers have offered Raspberry Pi hosting in EU
| and elsewhere for quite a while.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| "the low price of EUR 169 a month and EUR 179 setup fee"
|
| Yikes. Although it is 80-core, 128GB, I suppose.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The prices seem reasonable for a dedicated server.
|
| That means a little above EUR 4000 for 2 years, which is around
| the minimum that would be paid for a server with Epyc or Xeon
| of similar capacity (when you assemble it yourself, at Dell or
| HP it would be much more expensive).
|
| The equivalence with Epyc/Xeon also depends a lot on the
| intended applications, for scientific computing a 32 cores/64
| threads Epyc/Xeon might have a similar performance, while for a
| Web server or database server a 64 cores/128 threads Epyc might
| be needed to exceed the performance of the 80-core Altra CPU,
| and a server like that might cost as much as 4 years of
| renting.
|
| So if you buy your own server and you use it for at least 5
| years, then you would certainly spend much less than when
| renting.
|
| However, renting a server like this can cost less when you are
| not certain over long-term perspectives and it also has the
| advantage that there is no large one-time payment.
| moonchrome wrote:
| You're comparing price of buying vs renting with
| power/network/etc. included in cost ?
| adrian_b wrote:
| I have just compared the price of buying.
|
| Adding the electrical energy cost will tip the balance
| towards renting, but the energy cost varies a lot from
| place to place. For a server so expensive it is likely that
| the energy cost over its lifetime will be a relatively
| small fraction of the buying price.
|
| The energy cost becomes much more important for those who
| buy 1000 servers at heavily discounted prices.
|
| The price for the Internet link can vary a lot and I do not
| think that it is included in the rental price quoted above.
| I believe that it will be paid separately, depending on
| requirements, and it is likely that it would not differ
| much from what you would pay when having your own server.
| moonchrome wrote:
| From what I understand the 1GB/s uncapped internet
| connection is included in price.
| xuki wrote:
| What you're describing is colocation and it's not cheap.
| Hetzner also take care of the hardware for you, if there
| is anything wrong with hardware they fix it.
| adrian_b wrote:
| If someone needs colocation, i.e. the rental of a space
| for the server, then that will of course increase the
| likelihood that renting a server is more advantageous
| than buying a server.
|
| However there are many who have their own server rooms,
| so they do not need to rent any extra space for a server.
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| It is not that pricy if you look at the beefiest intel/amd
| machines. However you really have to get better performance
| from these to justify the price. Unless core count is somehow
| more important to the specific use case.
| rakoo wrote:
| I suppose a simple server with very little computing (web,
| irc, stuff like that) should benefit from this
| dx034 wrote:
| Much cheaper than a comparable x64 machine. But only if you can
| use 80 cores.
| pjerem wrote:
| Using 80 (or x) cores is pretty easy in any web (or network)
| workload where non blocking multi threading is the norm.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Didn't OVH/Soyoustart offer ARM based systems a few years ago?
|
| I faintly remember ARM Cortexs back in 2015 or 2016.
| blfr wrote:
| I have had an arm-based dedicated server with OVH (old SoYouStart
| line) for over four years now: processor
| : 0 model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l)
|
| It's in Gravelins.
| eptcyka wrote:
| So they should rephrase it to mean that they're the first to
| offer ARMv8 dedicated servers?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| No.. they should just rephrase that they offer arm based
| dedicated servers instead of trying to reach the headlines
| eptcyka wrote:
| I'd say having access to dedicated ARMv8 in Europe is
| headline worthy.
| nwh5jg56df wrote:
| Agree, some interesting problems require it
| Twirrim wrote:
| They're not even that. AWS (via Graviton) and OCI (via the
| same Ampere Altra chips Hetzner are using) at least have had
| Arm servers in Europe for a while. AWS longer than OCI.
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| The old storage server with Dual Core 1GHZ ARM CPUs?
| blfr wrote:
| This one, yes.
| rvnx wrote:
| Google Cloud offers Ampere servers in multiple regions under
| label T2A for quite some time now and probably Alibaba Cloud /
| Huawei Cloud (haven't verified) and others
| baobob wrote:
| None of these are European companies. It already matters to
| some today, but due to policy pushes within Europe over the
| next 10 years it is going to matter to a whole lot more
| esseti wrote:
| that's a point that many (too many) people misses right now.
| it will cause a lot of problem. If someone is able to
| reproduce (somehow) what AWS / Google does fro cloud, but
| with an EU company, they will have a lot of new customers
| very soon.
| rvnx wrote:
| It's a common confusion, but when you contract with Google
| Cloud, the service is provided by "Google Cloud EMEA
| Limited, Ireland", which is an European company, and when
| they provide you with a datacenter in Europe they are
| totally an European company operating in Europe.
|
| This is different for example to DigitalOcean LLC, that is
| a US-entity providing service to European customers (this
| example has to be verified, but that's what I remember).
| openplatypus wrote:
| Google Cloud EMEA Limited, Ireland is subsidiary of US
| entity. It could just as well could be a US company with
| respect to privacy laws and regulations.
| baobob wrote:
| This is a distinction that will be increasingly lost on
| EU regulators, more so than it already is today.
| waffleiron wrote:
| It is lost on regulators due to CLOUD act. The parent
| company still can access the personal data stored by
| subsidiaries.
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| Do they offer dedicated servers?
| tecleandor wrote:
| AFAIK, Google's Bare Metal offerings are Intel only.
| dx034 wrote:
| They only offer virtual servers, not dedicated servers. In the
| end it shouldn't matter too much, but dedicated servers tend to
| be much cheaper.
| joyfylbanana wrote:
| Also some people might prefer dedicated over virtual for
| whatever reasons.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This is not true. I had an ARM based server from scaleway in
| Paris years ago.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Was really excited to see something more reminiscent of the
| Scaleway era -- small 4-16 core ARM boxes with modest
| memory/storage/network
|
| Not quite sure how to phrase my reaction. Not really
| disappointed, but I suppose confused. Something this beefed up
| I'd probably rather have Epyc
| iasay wrote:
| These guys have been doing it for a while now:
| https://vboxx.eu/mac-hosting
| dx034 wrote:
| Hetzner has also been offering arm based macs for a while now.
| Maybe they don't include them in their definition because
| technically they're not servers?
| iasay wrote:
| They're not really any different to a Sun pizza box and we
| used them as servers back in the day :)
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Scaleway had their own self-developed ARM boards like 5 years ago
| with dedicated cores and RAM, although it was mostly for testing
| and development and was very low price.
| julienfr112 wrote:
| That was VM if I remember right, not bare metal
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| It was a dedicated server with 4 ARM Cores.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| It also barely worked at all.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| User error.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| IIRC Scaleway discontinued it because _they_ considered it
| too buggy, so probably not.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| It was the network based filesystem that was buggy. I had
| an atom server as well that used the same and they also
| discontinued that for the same reason.
|
| It was more of a service architectural problem than a
| technical one with ARM as a platform.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Too few customers. People reasoned (wrongfully I think)
| that ARM on the server-side was a gamble because ARM-
| based desktops and developer setups were not a big thing.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Maybe that too, but officially the reason was
| reliability.
|
| > As explained in our email, Scaleway's C2 and ARM
| Instances suffer from random instabilities that prevent
| us to keep market them
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22878771
|
| > As of December 1 st, 2020, our C2 and ARM64 Instances
| will reach their end-of-life. The physical servers
| hosting them are indeed randomly affected by several
| stability issues, which prevent us from fully
| guaranteeing the overall quality of service.
|
| - https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/g11uuj/sca
| leway...
| onli wrote:
| I hosted my blog with them. Not too bad for a personal
| project (and the price was great), but the pingdom chart
| at that time had lots of holes.
|
| Those small ARM servers were quite nice and perfectly
| cheap, but reliable they really were not.
|
| Oh, and they were often out of stock, so they did not
| have not enough customers. Maybe not enough hardware
| supply.
| bee_rider wrote:
| They appear to have been correct, for the last 5 years at
| least.
| geokon wrote:
| They also managed to find the only ARM CPUs in existence that
| don't have NEON instructions... very fun to debug..
| IgorPartola wrote:
| And somehow had no support for IPv6.
| [deleted]
| Tea418 wrote:
| Actually this is Hetzner's second attempt offering Arm-based
| dedicated servers. They launched the AX10 model[1] in 2015[2]. It
| seems like they started to use the "AX" prefix for the AMD-based
| line later.
|
| [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-
| info...
|
| [2] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Guenstige-
| Rootserver...
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| That's the 3rd big win for Ampere. Already in Google and Oracles
| clouds
| adrian_b wrote:
| Also in Microsoft Azure. So this is 4th win.
|
| The main companies that are missing from their customer list
| are Amazon and Alibaba.
|
| Both Amazon and Alibaba, have their own 64-big-cores or
| 128-medium-cores ARM server CPU designs (the 80 or 128 cores in
| Altra are medium cores), and both designs are superior to Altra
| in performance and also in ISA level support (Amazon Graviton 3
| supports Armv8.4-A with SVE, while Alibaba Yitian 710 supports
| Armv9.0-A with SVE2).
|
| It remains to be seen whether the custom ARM cores on which the
| Ampere design team works for their next CPU generation will
| succeed to leapfrog the CPUs of Amazon and Alibaba (which are
| using cores licensed from the ARM company).
| raverbashing wrote:
| Any Ampere vs M1/M2 comparisons I wonder...
| baobob wrote:
| It doesn't look like there's much margin to be gained with these,
| the smallest is priced only slightly cheaper than their Ryzen
| machines on a threads-per-buck basis, but comes with
| substantially lower memory per thread.
|
| It looks like you'd always be better off buying multiples of
| their Ryzens rather than one of these if your workload supports
| horizontal partitioning
| tecleandor wrote:
| Don't know about the Ryzen vs Ampera performance, but it's
| probably great if you REALLY need ARM processor, as the
| selection right now is limited unless you do VMs in Google
| Cloud or AWS.
|
| So whoever does CI/CD, testing, building... for ARM is gonna be
| grateful for this.
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(page generated 2022-07-20 23:02 UTC)