Canonical announces expanded Ubuntu support for the Cavium workload

Optimisation for deployment and provisioning cloud based workloads at scale

London and Computex TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 3, 2014 – Canonical today announced expanded support for the ThunderX SoC family from Cavium, Inc., (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data centre, cloud, wired and wireless networking. With this announcement Canonical builds on the strategic partnership that initially delivered Ubuntu 13.10 support on ThunderX in 2013.

Canonical will continue to provide development and support for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release on ThunderX, as announced in April. Ubuntu is the first commercial-grade platform for ARM64 computing. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Juju and MAAS to easily design, deploy and scale services faster than any other platform available today, on cloud or bare metal. Juju meets the DevOps imperative for agility, continuous deployment and integration, and MAAS provides scalable bare-metal deployment. With optimised integration for the ThunderX SoC Family, Ubuntu delivers the requirements of a true Hyperscale Data Center environment.

The ThunderX SoC family aims to deliver an optimal combination of compute, storage, networking and security integration for the scale out cloud and cloud specific workloads. Canonical has demonstrated industry leadership in the cloud market and is the most widely used OpenStack distribution with its investment in OpenStack development and deployment. With today’s announcement Canonical will be partnering with Cavium to optimise OpenStack for the ThunderX SoC family. This will include Cavium’s participation in Canonical’s OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL). The Lab runs over 3,000 OpenStack tests each week, using different combinations of Ubuntu, OpenStack and third party technologies, to provide customer assurance of interoperability and performance with their preferred solutions in private OpenStack environments.

“Cavium has proven to be a key partner for the Ubuntu community and Canonical. Canonical is a leader in the ARM software ecosystem and ThunderX™ allows us to truly showcase Ubuntu in the hyperscale server market,” commented Christian Reis, VP Hyperscale at Canonical. “The Cavium team has demonstrated a strong commitment to open source development and upstream community engagement. We look forward to continuing to build on our partnership with Cavium.”

“We believe our partnership with Canonical has demonstrated to the market what true collaboration is all about. The complement of Canonical’s leadership in cloud deployment optimised for Cavium’s ThunderX SoC solution we believe this addresses what today’s data centers have been looking for,” said Larry Wikelius, Director Thunder Ecosystems and Partner Enablement. “Canonical continues to demonstrate thought leadership in key server market segments and we believe our end users will benefit from this partnership.”

The ThunderX product family provides the best in class 64-bit ARMv8 data centre and cloud processors, which offer an unprecedented level of integration and industry leading ARMv8 SoC performance. With high performance custom cores, single and dual socket configurations, very high memory bandwidth, large memory capacity, integrated hardware accelerators, fully virtualised core and IO, scalable Ethernet fabric and feature rich I/O’s that enable best in class performance per dollar and performance per watt. The ThunderX family includes multiple workload-optimidsed SKUs that enable servers and appliances that are optimized for compute, storage, network and secure compute workloads in the cloud. The ThunderX processor family is fully compliant with ARMv8 architecture specifications as well as ARM’s SBSA.