Anything with SD card storage will perform very poorly. Anything that uses USB 2.0 as a system bus will perform like dogshit.
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.
ODROIDs come with eMMC storage, and they recommend using it over the SD card for this reason. (I haven't tried it, since the workloads I'm using it with tend to be CPU bound and SD cards are so much easier to find, so I don't know how much of an improvement it is.)
SD card is fine if you load your junk into memory and run out of ram. Few seconds of boot, but totally doable. Just need to go off box for mostly everything from logs to whatnot...
What exactly is stopping ARM boards to have high IO?
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.
The Raspberry Pi CPUs were designed for smartphones, so they have a limited USB port that was only intended to support that use case.
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.
For 32 bit ARM, it seems to be shortcuts in the SoC design a.k.a there's a reason some boards cost under $50.
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.
I would say it is not so much shortcuts as the fact that the 32-bit SoCs are generally designed for mobile. The only way to get a cheap devboard is to use an SoC which is being produced in high volume, so it doesn't have a prohibitive cost. That means you get the peripherals that a mobile phone or tablet wants, and not the ones that it doesn't, typically. If you insist on using an SoC custom designed for a devboard then the board is probably going to be tens of thousands of dollars.
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.
SoCs with 8GB onboard is a pretty niche chip, but other than that it's all out there. The Raspberry Pi/2 is actually a pretty poor offering - you can do better, even at the same price, The Pi Foundation just does a better job of marketing.
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 :<
Demand mostly. Also the way ARM does I/O is a bit different, that said, a memory mapped "smart" disk controller is pretty straight forward, the trick is getting access to the memory bus crossbar switch inside the chip. Bolting one on, all of your peripherals go through one memory bus.
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.
Because they're usually based on mobile phone or similar SoCs. However, at least 4 companies are promising to deliver Server-class chips this year - Cavium, Avago (ex Broadcom), Qualcomm, and AMD.
(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 11.88 € option has an Exynos 5422 + 2 GB RAM + 32 GB MicroSD card -- those are guts of a Galaxy S5 or Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. Interesting choice for a server.
I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible". I'm wondering who on earth is the market for this? 32 bit ARM (even A15) is not a great server platform.
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.
I think by "interesting" you meant to write "terrible".
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"...?
I will try to test if those "servers" would be good for task processing. Example: let's say I have a ton of websites to crawl (high IO, not much CPU, ideally parallel). I could use a couple of these to cheaply do the job.
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.
I have an Odroid XU [1] which is similar to this. For 32 bit ARM it's actually not too slow, but I/O is terrible with an SD-card. There is an optional eMMC card which improves the situation, but IIRC there's no option to use an SSD. Note the server advertised here isn't quite the same so YMMV.
I could think of an application in which there would be minimal disk interaction and just lots of network action and in-memory processing so hypothetically it all depends on how the CPU handles parallelization through its cores.
Seconding this. I use an ODROID XU3 (the earlier model) for testing Servo on multicore ARM and it's surprisingly fast, especially if your workload parallelizes. It's amazing how much CPU/GPU power you can get for $75, and since it's both parallel, cheap, and based on a mainstream consumer SoC I would love for it to be a harbinger of things to come :)
What holds it back is the I/O (though I haven't tried using eMMC, which is probably a huge improvement) and driver issues, especially around graphics (the never-ending problem with ARM SoCs).
Everyone who says this is a bad price for the hardware, please link me to any other bare metal server for rent at 16e/mo. I haven't seen it, not at Hetzner, nor anywhere else.
You can hate on it all you want, but this is simply a unique offering.
Alright, thanks that's exactly what I wanted to know. Why don't the U.S. have good dedicated server offerings? Hetzner, Online, Kimsufi, they're all in Europe for some reason. Across the pond I've only found really expensive managed hosting solutions and VPS.
Dual-Core CPU AMD Athlon Regor 3.2GHz
3GB RAM
500GB SATA
5TB Traffic
40$ on serverpronto
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 security, basically there's two vectors a Hetzner compromise can be used against us, either they reboot a machine and get our data through rescue mode, or they gain physical access. VPS'es can be hacked fully digitally and transparently (i.e. if you have access to the hypervisor you're in).
There's performance concerns as well, but those don't really apply for ARM as obviously you can do better.
Performance is much better compared to VMs. Lower overheads, no emulated devices, and memory and storage controllers are not shared with other VMs. If you don't need "elastic" scaling, i.e. you have a relatively constant (base) workload, bare-metal dedicated servers should have a much higher performance/price ratio.
Compared to VPS, you give up some flexibility (bare metal servers are generally only available for a month), but, at equivalent price, the specs are better on bare metal servers.
Colo can be even cheaper, but it needs additional skills, and more upfront money investment. It's a whole different world.
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