Packet, Ampere Take On AWS With Bare Metal Arm Servers

Startups Packet and Ampere are taking on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with their new partnership that puts Ampere’s Arm-based servers in Packet’s bare metal cloud data centers. AWS also offers Arm-based compute instances in its public cloud, but Packet and Ampere say theirs is more powerful.Ampere is a chip company that launched in early 2018 by former Intel president Renee James. Its Arm-based eMAG processors have 32 cores operating at 3.3 GHz.Packet is a bare metal cloud and edge computing company. Jacob Smith, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Packet, said the new Ampere platforms represent a major upgrade from its 2016 Arm-based servers. “It represents big-boy Arm, for serious workloads,” he said.Under the partnership, Packet offers on-demand access to Ampere’s eMAG platform with 128 GB of RAM, 480 GB of SSD storage, and dual 10 Gb/s network ports. It costs $1 per hour, and it’s available from Packet’s five core data centers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, as well as its three edge sites in the U.S. These systems target high-performance compute and high-memory workloads such as web servers, distributed databases, big data analytics, IoT, and media streaming.