ARM joined Xen Project two years ago as part of its drive into servers, networking and the emerging “Internet of Things†markets. In our latest “Future of Xen†video, Thomas Molgaard, Manager of Software Marketing – Systems & Software at ARM, talks about changes unfolding in enterprise and cloud computing that are creating new opportunities for his company and virtualization.
ARM designs the technology that is at the heart of advanced digital products, from wireless, networking and consumer entertainment solutions to imaging, automotive, security and storage devices. It offers electronics companies a comprehensive semiconductor IP portfolio, enhanced by the company’s broad partner community that increasingly embraces open source.
The company believes open source and its collaborative development model is keeping pace with transitions in the industry, helping to give companies more deployment options when it comes to cloud hosting, caching, scale-out storage and NoSQL and Hadoop analytics. ARM is hoping to offer even more variety to these application users. Early on the semiconductor design company recognized that Linux and Xen would play an important role in opening data centers up to enterprise-class 64-bit ARMv8 servers.  This recent eWeek article showcases a proof point from Cavium, one of the earliest vendors to launch ARM-based chips for servers, on display last week at OpenStack Summit in Vancouver.
Built from the ground up with open source best practices, Xen virtualization is increasingly deployed in applications targeted by ARM customers, including servers, networking infrastructure and embedded systems.  First to market with ARM support, Xen Project’s original ARM support focused on newer CPUs designed for servers. Taking direction from the community, ARM and Xen have expanded their scope to mobile, tablet, automotive, Internet of Things, midddlebox processing and other embedded applications.
In the video, Molgaard describes how Xen’s lean architecture is perfectly suited to ARM architecture-based solutions. Collaboration with the open source partners like Xen Project, Linaro and The Linux Foundation is extremely valuable as ARM makes further inroads in the data center and cloud infrastructure, he says.