Online launches cloud service powered by Cavium's ThunderX workload optimized processors

Online, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the leading French Telecom company Iliad Group and one of the leading web hosting providers, has announced the commercial deployment of server platforms based on Cavium's ThunderX workload optimized processors as part of their Scaleway cloud service offering.

Online offers a range of services to Internet customers worldwide including domain names, web hosting, dedicated servers and hosting in their datacenter. With several hundred thousand servers deployed in their datacenter, Online is one of the largest web hosting providers in Europe. 

The ThunderX product family is Cavium's 64-bit ARMv8-A server processor for Datacenter and Cloud applications, and features high performance custom cores, single and dual socket configurations, high memory bandwidth and large memory capacity. The product family also includes integrated hardware accelerators, integrated feature rich high bandwidth network and storage IO, fully virtualized core and IO, and scalable high bandwidth, low latency Ethernet fabric, which affords ThunderX best-in-class performance per dollar. They are fully compliant with ARMv8-A architecture specifications as well as ARM's SBSA and SBBR standards, and widely supported by industry leading OS, Hypervisor and Software tool and application vendors.

Online is deploying dual socket 96 core ThunderX based platforms as part of their Scaleway IaaS cloud offering.  As part of this deployment, Online.net is introducing three starter ARMv8 servers at an attractive starting price of €0.006 per hour, which is less than one third of their current offering.  Scaleway cloud platform is fully supported by Ubuntu 16.04 OS, including LAMP stack, Docker, Puppet, Juju, Hadoop, MAAS, and more. The platforms also support all standard features of the Scaleway Cloud including flexible IPs, native IPv6, Snapshots and images. 

"Online success in the hosting server industry is built on providing disruptive technology with best-in-class customer experience. This requires us to deploy the most advanced, highest performance and highly scalable servers in our infrastructure," said Yann Léger, VP Cloud Computing at Online. "Cavium's ThunderX workload optimized servers provide an ideal vehicle to enable highly optimized platforms for scalable cloud workloads. We expect ThunderX based servers to deliver significant benefits in performance and TCO, thereby providing better performance and cost-efficiency than all existing solutions in the industry."

"ThunderX ARMv8 CPUs were designed to deliver best-in-class performance and TCO for targeted workloads and are being deployed at multiple hosting datacenters," said Gopal Hegde, VP/GM, Datacenter Processor Group at Cavium. "We are pleased to partner with one of Europe's elite hosting providers on server platforms for their next generation cloud datacenters. This partnership demonstrates continued acceptance of ThunderX platforms across largest and most demanding datacenters."