The feature can already be seen in ComodIT’s own application store and on the website of lifestreaming platform Storytlr, but is now available for anyone to use. In effect, it makes the installation of server-based apps a lot more like that of mobile apps – an almost one-click experience that even allows users to “share” the apps in question on Facebook and Twitter.

“You can embed the application – just copy and paste [a few lines of Javascript] and put it on your website. You add the direct install blue button and you allow anyone to install that application directly from your website,” ComodIT CEO Daniel Bartz told me.

Bartz suggested this approach would overcome the traditional open-source server software installation experience, which sometimes involves multi-page tutorials. The test-drive aspect is pretty neat too: when that option is chosen, ComodIT basically installs and runs the app for a free 100 minutes in an Amazon EC2 micro instance.

It makes marketing a bit easier for developers and of course it steers people towards ComodIT’s own distribution platform and wider services. As Bartz explained:

“When you click ‘direct install’, in fact you connect to ComodIT and you create a server on which you will install an OS and all the things that have to be done for installing applications. We’re automating the manual procedure – we do this like we do for any other pieces of ComodIT following the devops approach.

“Behind the scenes, we’re activating recipes for deployments. Within your ComodIT account you have access to all the recipes and descriptions that you usually have. The next step is deploying the application not only for testing but also for production, with all the ComodIT features like autoscaling and autobackup.

“We bring the user onto the platform and, as we have a business model based on the number of servers you’re managing with ComodIT, if you have more users installing the application through the direct install button, we’re a happy provider.”

It’s a smart idea and one that could give ComodIT a boost as it competes with the likes of Opscode and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) for devops’ attention.

ComodIT was a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition last year. This year’s Structure:Europe will take place in London from 18-19 September and, if you can’t wait until then for a high-level get-together around cloud automation and other such topics, don’t forget that our San Francisco Structure event is coming up on 19-20 June, too.

Here’s a video explaining how ComodIT’s direct install button works:

Disclosure:Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Karl Freund, the VP of marketing for Calxeda, says the company has shipped about 3,000 nodes and 130 systems although none are deployed in production environments yet. He expects the first production deployments to occur at the end of the second quarter of 2013. But most of the conversation was about how ARM-based systems could be used today in the storage market. Not just for cold storage such as Amazon’s Glacier or Facebook’s photo storage effort, but even for the big storage systems for scale out storage and enterprise class storage appliances. Named customers who are evaluating the systems include Scale.io, Gluster and Inktank, the storage startup backed by Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame that is commercializing Ceph.

There are more, notes Freund, (pictured) who says that when Calxeda servers make it into production environments, they will likely be deployed first in a storage capacity, as storage customers don’t care if the chips are 64-bit compatible. For now, ARM-based systems are stuck only able to address less memory because ARM only has a 32-bit capable core design. Next year ARM will have a 64-bit capable design and systems will be built around them in 2014 (maybe even late 2013). Calxeda plans its 64-bit capable SoC for 2014.

But Calxeda isn’t waiting and in storage, it’s also not focusing on power consumption — the initial draw for ARM-based servers in the scale out data center. For the storage world, where spinning hard drives tends to suck huge quantities of electricity, adding a low-power has a negligable affect on the consumption of an overall system. However, Calxeda boasts that popping in more of its systems on a chip (SoC) are both cheaper and make for faster information transfer and retrieval.

Its tests show roughly a 4X improvement in IOPs for a rack of Calxeda SoCs versus x86-based systems. Adding Calexeda’s SoCs also cuts complexity because the entire system of processing and networking components are integrated on the SoC, and the terabit-plus fabric between cores also offers more network capacity between cores in a system –the so-called east-west networking traffic.

As the market for scale out computing, storage and networking changes the demands made on IT equipment, Calxeda and others are seeing an opportunity that may have begun in servers and the cloud computing environment, but certainly isn’t stopping there. No wonder Intel is trying to catch up with chips of its own. So far, it’s recently announced new Atom-based chips haven’t made the cut for most customers I’ve spoken with (the lack of integration of the entworking and processing hardware is a problem), but in 2014 it will have a new, integrated SoC as well. Then, the competition will really get interesting.

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From the design challenge web site:

Servers are typically replaced about every four years. This is necessary to maintain fast, reliable equipment. Unfortunately, this results in a lot of waste. Open Compute wants to change this starting with the server chassis. These are typically made of steel, which is recyclable, but even recycling generates waste. What would happen if these chassis could be placed in compost instead?

Purdue University’s College of Technology entrepreneurship program, called Tech Ventures, will work with the Foundation and the social network to get students to rethink the humble chassis. The challenge will begin with a Computer and Information Technology (CNIT) course at Purdue in the spring semester. I, for one, can’t wait to see the cardboard server chassis, although in some ways I think eliminating the chassis and making the rack the protective unit for the boards and components might make more sense.

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SeaMicro's SM10000-64 server.

Chipmaker AMD plans to announce its acquisition of low-power server maker SeaMicro, according to my sources. This would be a huge move for AMD, which has to double down in the server market since it has failed in the mobile market.

SeaMicro’s servers are aimed at the emerging webscale and cloud computing market, and are fundamentally different machines than those built by HP, Dell and IBM. The promise of the boxes is they cram a lot of compute into a tight space and consume less power. The demand for this type of product has been so great that Intel actually designed a version of its Atom processor for the SeaMicro machines last year.

In January SeaMicro placed a traditional Intel Xeon server chip inside its boxes to enable the gear to take on a wider variety of data center applicaitons. At the time I wrote:

Tuesday’s announcement puts a traditional Xeon architecture chip inside SeaMicro’s boxes, and in doing so has remade the traditional server in SeaMicro’s vision. SeaMicro has whittled down a server into three component chips — the CPU, memory and SeaMicro’s proprietary ASIC that helps the hundreds of chips inside the box communicate. What’s notable here is how quickly and how powerfully web scale data center operators have turned the tables on the server and chip industry, which had long been dominated by the vendors delivering innovation at their pace.

So this buy gets AMD into the server business, even though SeaMicro’s core IP is around its customized chip that can handle the networking demands of more than 500 chips in a small space, and it also puts SeaMicro at odds with its former partner and chip supplier. And while SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman has told me on multiple occasions that any CPU could fit inside the boxes, this buy may force a quick change.

So far AMD and SeaMicro have not responded to my requests for comment. I will update the story later as I learn more.

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ARM-based chips can be found inside cell phones, set-top-boxes and game consoles, but as power became more of concern in the data center, companies such as Calxeda, Nvidia and Marvell have tried to shoehorn ARM-based chips into servers. In fact, the Wall Street Journal  expects HP to announce a deal with Calxeda that will see the computing giant ship 32-bit ARM-based servers to its customers. But as Tilera and other companies building chips for the data center and cloud computing market know, 32-bits only gets you so far.

Most server buyers want computers that will run at 64-bits, which can handle the latest software the machines are running. And while ARM’s announcement today will mean that capability is on the way, it still won’t be seen inside actual servers until 2014. The transition to 64 bits was on ARM’s roadmap, so the update isn’t exactly a surprise, but it is good news for the ecosystem of companies trying to unseat Intel and AMD from the data center.

ARM said in a release, that its new ARMv8 architecture:

…consists of two main execution states, AArch64 and AArch32. The AArch64 execution state introduces a new instruction set, A64 for 64-bit processing. The AArch32 state supports the existing ARM instruction set. The key features of the current ARMv7 architecture, including TrustZone®, virtualization and NEON™ advanced SIMD, are maintained or extended in the ARMv8 architecture.

For a deeper dive on the topic, check out how ARM could change the economics of the server industry and how long we may have to wait before clouds adopt non-86-based chips.

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That question won’t be answered today, but Intel is in the very least trying to avoid being a mobile loser as Qualcomm and other vendors using the ARM architecture make strides inside tablets and smartphones. Intel’s fighting to control the consumer computing market as consumers want low-power portable devices, while also trying to continue its expansion on the server side, where it has seen tremendous growth.

The Haswell products, which unfortunately won’t be out until 2013, will have 10 days of standby battery life, which puts Intel into the same league as ARM’s designs. However, it’s unclear where vendors such as Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple and other ARM licensees might be in terms of performance and power consumption at that time. And while software platforms are now tuned to Intel and ARM-based chips, Intel lost out on a huge advantage by being slow to cut power consumption. A year ago, before Microsoft committed to support ARM-based chips, Intel had a significant advantage.

Intel is also going to have to fight to get its way into handsets, which can take a long time. For example, Nvidia launched its first application processor in 2008 and only scored some major wins in devices in 2011. Handset makers aren’t eager to pick up new-fangled chips in their devices, so it can take a while. However, in the tablet market, Intel could pick up traction, as enterprise customers are already in favor of using Intel on the devices judging from Cisco’s efforts with the Cius tablet.

Haswell, which Intel showed off running on a solar panel, also may have a spot in the micro server market, according to Andrew Feldman, CEO of SeaMicro. SeaMicro makes a rack of servers that use Atom chips today, but could end up using high-end Atom chips or low-end Haswell chips. By covering both ends of the low-power market, Intel is signaling it’s serious about low power, both for the client side and on the server side.

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On one side, Dell faces huge encroachments from Apple’s phones and tablets, which are cutting into Dell’s consumer PC and notebook business. On the other, it faces threats from Quanta and other wholesale manufacturers as efforts such as Facebook’s Open Compute threaten to reduce its importance in the server-making business for large webscale buyers and even cloud companies.

Dell’s losing streak on the consumer side.

Dell’s consumer business hit the skids this quarter and was down 3 percent from the previous quarter, although up from the previous year. However, at 19 percent of Dell’s revenue, the consumer business is an important one for Dell and one where it appears to be struggling.

Part of this is that consumer demand for laptops and desktops has been affected by Apple — not just because people are buying iPads, but also because there is a halo effect that leads consumers to purchase more Apple computers after they get stuck on the phones and tablets. Analyst Shaw Wu at Sterne, Agee & Leach told Bloomberg that he expects 45 percent of Dell’s business is vulnerable to Apple. That’s not just because the consumer market likes iPads and MacBooks, but also because enterprises and small to medium businesses are adopting the iconic machines.

There’s also a challenge to Dell’s core PC business on the consumer side because the PC is increasingly seen as a dinosaur. Today, Gartner released PC shipment sales for Europe and the U.S. that shows that while Dell’s market share increased by tens of basis points, overall units sold declined by 12.7 percent in Western Europe from the second quarter of the previous year. And while Michael Dell said on the results call that plans for the Windows 8 tablet are coming along well and that it still supports Android, these are not the tablets people are buying. Just last week, Dell canceled the five-inch Streak tablet/phone combo.

The cloud is strong now, but it could evaporate.

The server business isn’t so grim, although Dell did mention a weakness in public sector buying of servers and computers. However, the company is in the midst of transition from a low-margin server seller and a reseller of other companies’ products to a purveyor of its own, higher-margin gear.

Forrest Norrad, head of DCS

This seemed to cause analysts much chagrin as Dell saw revenue in its storage business drop rapidly after it stopped reselling EMC gear to focus on building up its portfolio of storage products. Analysts were concerned that a similar gap could occur as Dell transitions to selling its own networking gear after the Force10 acquisition.

But there’s another threat on the server side, which is Facebook’s Open Compute effort and the creation of a community of IT buyers that wants to eliminate the middlemen in server sales and go directly to ODMs such as Quanta to get exactly the type of servers they want and need. And while Dell can adapt to serve the needs of large webscale and IT buyers — it has in many ways with the creation of Dell’s Cloud Computing Solutions group for webscale customers — its inability to do so in the past partially led to the need to create a new way of looking at servers designed specifically for companies such as Facebook, Rackspace and others. Even investment banks are looking at ways to use the standard to create their own hardware.

That’s a looming threat, but a direct one. Less direct is the result of governments and SMBs that are big Dell clients moving their businesses to cloud providers. Unless Dell ensures it’s a supplier to those cloud providers (and Open Compute may make that more difficult or less profitable), it could find itself with its own Dell gear and few folks to sell it to.

The narrow path for Dell.

So Michael Dell is stuck trying to find a way to reinvigorate a consumer business where its name is synonymous with the aging PC, while developing tablets and other mobile devices to sell to both consumers and businesses. Winning against Apple in this realm won’t be easy, and there’s also plenty of low-cost Chinese competition that’s moving into this sector including ZTE, which Dell currently resells.

Meanwhile, the cloud that these mobile devices connect to may not be powered by Dell boxes anymore, but instead by gear made by the same company Dell uses to manufacture its products. So Michael Dell must hope that he can boost the higher-margin Dell-branded technology and IP to a point where it can win over enterprises and businesses.

It will also rely on services such as those to get people up and running on the cloud faster. Recent news around its Crowbar tool is an example of how Dell’s taking this road — it’s adding value to its server business by easing the task of deploying cloud computing and big data software onto them. Let’s hope the path opens up a bit to leave Dell with room to maneuver.

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The paper, issued Monday, and written by three Facebook engineers and one Tilera engineer, is called “Many-Core Key Value Store.” The goal was to test Facebook’s memcached structure using Intel 4-core Xeon and AMD 8-core processors — the de facto standard in most data centers today — against Tilera’s lower-performance (in gigahertz) but massively multicore chips. The paper discovered that for large key value stores such as how Facebook stores its user data, Tilera’s many-node chips were more efficient than multiple Intel or AMD boxes, despite the higher costs associated with using non-commodity chips. Those costs include both the silicon and tweaking the software to run on a different instruction set. From the paper:

Low-power many-core processors are well suited to KV- store workloads with large amounts of data. Despite their low clock speeds, these architectures can perform on-par or better than comparably powered low-core-count x86 server processors. Our experiments show that a tuned version of Memcached on the 64-core Tilera TILEPro64 can yield at least 67% higher throughput than low-power x86 servers at comparable latency. When taking power and node integration into account as well, a TILEPro64-based S2Q server with 8 processors handles at least three times as many transactions per second per Watt as the x86-based servers with the same memory footprint.

Although Tilera can’t disclose whether or not this paper means Facebook is buying boxes with Tilera silicon inside, it is one of many cracks that will eventually break the x86 hegemony in the data center, as power constraints and monolithic applications change the economics of computing. No longer does cheap general-purpose hardware win automatically. With companies deploying tens of thousands of servers, sometimes all in service of one application, driving costs out of the boxes and operations have become essential. And because these servers in webscale or cloud operations generally act as a node in one single application (or an aspect of a web service), it makes sense to write custom software for the platform if the savings in power or boosts in performance are sufficient.

So Facebook’s tests could help Tilera boost its business and acceptance for applications that are dependent on a key value store, such as Twitter or Zynga. Along the way, it is part of a trend among larger server buyers rethinking not just the hardware design, but also how the measure their hardware and performance. Ihab Bishara, director of cloud computing products at Tilera, notes that many of the big webscale companies have hired silicon engineers to help eke out as much efficiency as possible from the systems and evaluate the best ways to measure performance for the types of workloads they run on their machines. These trends are set to shake up the world of hardware.

For a detailed look at this, watch the video below with Omid Tahernia, president and CEO at Tilera.

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Look, Ma! Six servers on a board.

SeaMicro, the company building low-power specialty servers for web companies, has managed to increase the amount of computing power under its hood by 50 percent while decreasing the power consumption of its machines by a quarter in its third-generation product. The latest box comes a mere four months after the company has released its second-generation hardware with a specially designed Intel chip.

SeaMicro is offering boxes for web companies that need so-called “wimpy nodes” that can perform smaller workloads while using less power. Customers include France Telecom, Mozilla and eHarmony.

SeaMicro’s CEO Andrew Feldman was eager to discuss how the four-year-old startup manages to release a new product every few months, despite the accepted wisdom that says hardware design requires months and years of effort before new designs make it to the market. Feldman credits the startup’s ability to move quickly with the specialty chip inside SeaMicro’s box that controls how the servers talk to one another. Those specialty networking chips are CPU-agnostic, meaning they could work with any chip, be it an x86 chip from Intel or AMD or a specialty chip from a company such as Tilera. Even ARM-based CPUs could work inside a SeaMicro box.

The specialty silicon also enables the company to offer a 1.28 Terabit fabric inside the box to help the different CPUs communicate on the board and inside a box — which takes up to 10 rack units of space. This becomes significant as one realizes that the latest-generation box contains 768 cores as opposed to the previous two generations’ 512 cores.

For the business-minded folks out there, this approach to delivering new products quickly sets SeaMicro up for success as trends in software, data center design and customer demand shifts in faster and faster cycles. Companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Zynga are seeing demand for servers skyrocket and can’t afford to wait for the 12-18-month cycles of silicon and hardware refresh. Facebook has become so disillusioned with today’s server progress it has created the Open Compute effort to take design into its own hands.

Currently, SeaMicro is working closely with Intel to release its boxes at a faster pace, and Jason Waxman, the general manager of high-density computing at Intel, explains that while silicon development still moves at a relatively slower pace, there are things Intel can do to help partners push the hardware design cycle faster. For example, Intel worked with SeaMicro to create the 64-bit Atom chip SeaMicro introduced in its second-generation product.

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In the video below I spoke with Waxman, about the ever-growing need for servers and how we can sustain that kind of demand for compute. He didn’t spend much time on power efficiency but he did predict a coming era of facial recognition and video search driven by more compute power. We also discussed the server architecture debate that has led to the creation of startups such as SeaMicro, Calxeda and Tilera, which are rethinking the ways servers and chips for servers are built.

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