Ampere donates hardware to Debian to strengthen the Arm ecosystem

Ampere has partnered with Debian to support the hardware infrastructure by donating three of Ampere's high-performance Arm64 servers. These Lenovo ThinkSystem HR330A servers contain Ampere's eMAG processor with a 64-bit Arm®v8 processor specifically designed for cloud servers, equipped with 256 GB of RAM, 960 GB dual SSDs and a 25 GbE dual port NIC.

The donated servers were deployed at the University of British Columbia, the Debian hosting partner in Vancouver, Canada. Debian system administrators (DSAs) have configured them to run arm64 / armhf / armel daemons, replacing build daemons running on less powerful development boards. On virtual machines with half the number of vCPUs allocated, the result was that the time to build Arm * packages was halved with the eMAG Ampere system.

Ampere: Our partnership with Debian supports our developer strategy to expand the open source communities which run on Ampere servers to further build out the Arm64 ecosystem and enable the creation of new applications, said Mauri Whalen, vice president of software engineering at Ampere. Debian is a well-run and respected community, and we are proud to work with them.

The Debian System Administrators are grateful to Ampere for the donation of carrier-grade Arm64 servers. Having servers with integrated standard management interfaces such as Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), and with Lenovo's hardware warranties and support organization behind them, is precisely what DSA has been wanting for the Arm64 architecture. These servers are very powerful and very well equipped: we anticipate using them for general services in addition to Arm64 build daemons. I think they'll prove to be very appealing to cloud operators and I'm thrilled that Ampere Computing has partnered with Debian. - Luca Filipozzi, Debian System Administrator.