Industry Expert Blogs

ARM extends Server and standards ecosystem

While working with the ecosystem partners to develop server systems based on ARM technologies, we aim to respond to ideas and suggestions and incorporate them into our server solutions.

Having made great progress in defining hardware and firmware requirements to cover boot and normal operation, now we are looking further into server deployment, and how servers fit into the datacentre.

A number of partners have asked us to study this problem. ODMs and SW vendors providing datacenter maintenance solutions have requested that we provide a common operating system (OS) to baseboard management controller (BMC) interface and a common OS to System-on-Chip (SoC) interface. In addition, ODMs have also requested us to provide a common BMC to SoC interface. One of the great assets of the ARM ecosystem is diversity, but at the same time, this can bring unwanted differentiation. Standardizing these interfaces can help eliminate the differentiation that leads to significant development work but not is appreciated by the end customers.

Redfish is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for datacenter management. While other standards such as IPMI and DCMI are closed to innovation, Redfish currently provides the only truly open standard that the ARM ecosystem can contribute to and shape for the future.