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.
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).
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 ® Altra ® 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 € 169 a month and € 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 € 219 a month and a setup fee of € 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.
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.
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...
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.
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]
> 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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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
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).
Pretty much as I expected with M2 winning single core and Altra winning multi. But if you look at the individual multicore tests, certain ones the M2 seems to be optimized for (camera, PDF rendering), and it blows away Altra. Probably the audio-video-photo units on the M2.
Really not the best comparison, imo, because they are built for different ends. Still interesting
I'd also probably order the 10G for that price if it was just a checkbox in the order process. But opening a ticket later (and downtime for the server), or waiting substantially longer for the server to be available isn't really an option for me. I'm wondering if they deliberately do that because their switches couldn't handle too many 10G servers?
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?
But I believe the mac mini doesn't have ECC Ram? I've had pretty bad experiences with non-ecc for database servers. It probably doesn't matter as much if you're only processing data where a bit flip isn't problematic or where data isn't stored aftewards (e.g. web server), but for data manipulation I wouldn't use non-ECC.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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).
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.
It can be an extra layer of security. At some point in the future there will probably be another exploit in supervisors or hardware that can be used to spy on other tenants. With dedicated servers that becomes harder.
I've heard of large companies that require their own hosts. But then again, if you're big enough it really makes sense to build your private cloud anyway.
[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...
[2] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Guenstige-Rootserver...