Hetzner to Offer First Arm-Based Dedicated Servers in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Hetzner to Offer First Arm-Based Dedicated Servers in Europe

hetzner.com

234 pointsdx034122 comments

Actually this is Hetzner’s second attempt offering Arm-based dedicated servers. They launched the AX10 model[1] in 2015[2]. It seems like they started to use the “AX” prefix for the AMD-based line later.

[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...

[2] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Guenstige-Rootserver...

AWS released a1.metal in EU regions in October 2019: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/introduci...

Those aren't dedicated servers. They use a hypervisor [0].

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/a1/

I think there's a1 (virtualized) and a1.metal (bare metal). Although I think the metal versions also include Nitro hardware.

But not my specialty.

The metal versions use the Nitro card, but run all of the virtualization on the Nitro card, so there is no hypervisor running on the machine. VMWare has had ESXi doing similar virtualization with the help of switches for a while too (although I think ESXi still has a tiny hypervisor).

Isn't there still a hypervisor present though but rather than the hypervisor running on a general purpose CPU it's running on the Nitro chipset? There's still a type 1 hypervisor involved no? How else would the hypercalls from the guests work?

There is no hypercalls. Your operating system is running directly on the CPU, same as regular bare metal servers.

There are no hypercalls and there is no hypervisor software on machines with this type of virtualization. All virtualization takes place at the network and storage device layer.

The Nitro card encapsulates packets from your machine so that they flow on the AWS network correctly, it emulates being an SSD, and it takes care of myriad other peripherals and interfaces that you might expect to have.

I think it also has a direct connection to the BMC or uses IPMI to reboot the machine when you are done with it (and another user takes it).

Ah OK, this is helpful, thanks. The IPMI functionality is certain nice to have.

Graviton is ARM-based and has offered .metal instances which don’t have a hypervisor, the latest generation being “Graviton 3” (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/join-the-preview-amazon-ec2...)

OCI released A1 Arm based bare metal (BM) and virtual machine instances last year too in EU regions, also based on the Ampere Altra chips that Hetzner is using.

So Hetzner seems to be way off track with this claim about being the first dedicated Arm based servers in Europe.

They might well be the cheapest though that’s not the claim. Approximately $170 USD per month for a system with a Q80-30 and 128GiB RAM plus unmetered/unlimited usage of a 1Gbps port is substantially less than all the cloud providers, OCI included.

Scaleway did it years ago (if you consider dev boards dedicated servers), before they had matured into something usable.

I had one of these. Performance was atrocious and they were generally unreliable.

A comparison between the mentioned Ampere Altra Q80-30 and AWS Graviton2:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/arms-race-ampere-altra-takes-on-...

A similar instance to the RX220 at Equinix (bare metal) would cost around $1800/month [1]. (8x Hetzner's price)

[1] https://metal.equinix.com/product/servers/c3-large-arm64/

I m a die hard fan of Hetzner, but well I m biased, I sleek German and live in Europe.

Their prices are unmatched and their service is awesome. The got Mac Mini M1 Servers as low as 50€.

And big dedicated servers. In my company we use 80% hetzner.

I'm a die-hard Hetzner fan, too. I have personal servers on AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, GCP, and Vultr, but I think my Hetzner server is my favorite & provides the biggest bang for the buck.

Oh, and I'm American, I speak English, and I live in San Francisco.

2x25G though vs 1G at Hetzner (max 10G for 39€ extra). With that many cores, I guess it's easy to saturate 10G, 2x25G sounds much better.

I have had an arm-based dedicated server with OVH (old SoYouStart line) for over four years now:

    processor       : 0
    model name      : ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l)

It's in Gravelins.

The old storage server with Dual Core 1GHZ ARM CPUs?

This one, yes.

Those came out before cheaper VPSs with that storage level came out.

So they should rephrase it to mean that they're the first to offer ARMv8 dedicated servers?

No.. they should just rephrase that they offer arm based dedicated servers instead of trying to reach the headlines

I'd say having access to dedicated ARMv8 in Europe is headline worthy.

Agree, some interesting problems require it

They're not even that. AWS (via Graviton) and OCI (via the same Ampere Altra chips Hetzner are using) at least have had Arm servers in Europe for a while. AWS longer than OCI.

Scaleway had their own self-developed ARM boards like 5 years ago with dedicated cores and RAM, although it was mostly for testing and development and was very low price.

And somehow had no support for IPv6.

That was VM if I remember right, not bare metal

It was a dedicated server with 4 ARM Cores.

It also barely worked at all.

User error.

IIRC Scaleway discontinued it because they considered it too buggy, so probably not.

Too few customers. People reasoned (wrongfully I think) that ARM on the server-side was a gamble because ARM-based desktops and developer setups were not a big thing.

They appear to have been correct, for the last 5 years at least.

Maybe that too, but officially the reason was reliability.

> As explained in our email, Scaleway’s C2 and ARM Instances suffer from random instabilities that prevent us to keep market them

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22878771

> As of December 1 st, 2020, our C2 and ARM64 Instances will reach their end-of-life. The physical servers hosting them are indeed randomly affected by several stability issues, which prevent us from fully guaranteeing the overall quality of service.

- https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/g11uuj/scaleway...

I hosted my blog with them. Not too bad for a personal project (and the price was great), but the pingdom chart at that time had lots of holes.

Those small ARM servers were quite nice and perfectly cheap, but reliable they really were not.

Oh, and they were often out of stock, so they did not have not enough customers. Maybe not enough hardware supply.

It was the network based filesystem that was buggy. I had an atom server as well that used the same and they also discontinued that for the same reason.

It was more of a service architectural problem than a technical one with ARM as a platform.

They also managed to find the only ARM CPUs in existence that don't have NEON instructions... very fun to debug..

Totally off topic, but why on earth is text selection disabled in this page on mobile? I was excited to share an excerpt with my team and am just frustrated now.

That is super odd - I’m wondering if they just messed up some CSS. Another win for reader mode I suppose.

Reader mode saves the day :)

Here you go.

> RX-Line: Pushing the envelop of parallelization - Hetzner Online GmbH

> 19 July 2022

> RX-Line: Pushing the envelop of parallelization

> The new RX-line is now available and features the first Arm-based dedicated servers in Europe. The servers house an Ampere ® Altra ® Q80-30 SoC with Arm64 architecture, which gives you 80 cores of single-threaded processing power.

> The new line includes two models. The RX170 is the smaller model of the two, but it still comes with 128 GB DDR4 registered ECC memory modules and 2x 960 GB NVMe SSD at the low price of € 169 a month and € 179 setup fee. The RX220, on the other hand, comes with impressive 256 GB DDR4 registered ECC memory modules and 2 x 3.84 TB NVMe SSD at the fair price of € 219 a month and a setup fee of € 229.

> Where is the catch, you wonder? Only a few servers are currently available. As we work through ramping the supply chain for the RX Line, be the first to get an Ampere-based server. Over the next few months, expect further announcements of improved availability as we scale out this exciting product line.

> So what are you waiting for? Order yours now, and start saving time and money on your IT infrastructure.

> Check it out now

> All prices excl. VAT.

It's another case of a webpage working better with javascript disabled by default. Disabling javascript fixes more websites than it breaks.

Misleading title. "Hetzner to offer *their* first ARM-based"...

Who else already offers dedicated ARM-based servers in Europe? Just curious.

Edit: …except Hetzner themselves who already did in 2015 as noted upthread.

There have been various hosting services that have hosted Raspberry Pi units - some of them even did this for free. I submit this in the best HN spirit of technically-correct.

The best kind of correct. ;)

Scaleway did. It was some Marvell Armada SoC IIRC.

>cat /proc/cpuinfo

>processor : 0

>model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l)

This is on a server I have at OVH (SoYouStart to be accurate) from july 2018

Scaleway / Online.net

Equinix Metal does with 1-y commit

This page says on-demand is an option: https://metal.equinix.com/product/servers/c3-large-arm64/

Maybe if you ask support, i just went to console and ondemand not showing arm in europe

OVH, Scaleway

Wasn't this Scaleway's big launch a decade ago? Funny how the world comes full circle eventually…

These are heavy processors with 80 cores. Scaleway had entirely different proposal, more like RPi's stacked or something. I haven't seen anything like this before so interesting to see if anyone can comment on their performance/stability/etc.

Check the specs here: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-rx

Yes, although I think they were shared in vms?

Shared disk IIRC, not VMs.

They had 1U servers full of boards connected to a backplane (or so it seems) [1], but the storage was shared and centralized in a SAN.

https://www.cnx-software.com/2015/04/02/scaleway-provides-de...

Edit: Here are some pics for the ARM modules: https://www.cnx-software.com/2014/12/30/iliads-online-labs-o...

> They had 1U servers full of boards connected to a backplane (or so it seems) [1], but the storage was shared and centralized in a SAN.

This bit was pretty horrific and could seriously cramp your style trying to do things with those servers, too; you had to boot to a provided kernel so they could start up an nbd-client in early boot, which for extra fun you could accidentally kill while the machine was booted, which would probably force a power cycle.

Oh, I remember, that was a mess. IIRC there were only certain kernels available and you couldn't build modules (or at least not easily).

I think I had problems to enable modules for filesystems or Docker or something like that.

Yep! They launched the C1 servers in 2013 and in 2014 they were providing Docker support for them [1]. Of course, those were simple and slow chips and these are 80cores Ampere Altra, but of course, it's not the first dedicated ARM service in Europe.

Note: IIRC Scaleway had their C1 servers booting from the network, not local disk, but still...

1: https://blog.scaleway.com/docker-on-c1/

Indeed, it was a little buggy but I truly loved it. I spent way more than I probably should have on fun tiny-ARM clusters... when I was just barely no longer a teenager [and I'm much older now]

It doesn't look like there's much margin to be gained with these, the smallest is priced only slightly cheaper than their Ryzen machines on a threads-per-buck basis, but comes with substantially lower memory per thread.

It looks like you'd always be better off buying multiples of their Ryzens rather than one of these if your workload supports horizontal partitioning

Don't know about the Ryzen vs Ampera performance, but it's probably great if you REALLY need ARM processor, as the selection right now is limited unless you do VMs in Google Cloud or AWS.

So whoever does CI/CD, testing, building... for ARM is gonna be grateful for this.

Mythic Beasts have had ARM-based dedicated servers in Europe since 2017 (over 5 years ago). They have many Raspberry Pi with POE and NAS (no SD cards). (Mythic Beasts also host the Raspberry Pi web site.)

https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2017/03/02/hosting-a-webs...

> features the first Arm-based dedicated servers in Europe

Not sure in what context these are "first" but Equinix Metal has had ARM servers for...definitely many years.

https://metal.equinix.com/product/servers/c3-large-arm64/

Hetzner looks like a great service, and I've heard a lot of good things about them. They now have a US datacenter however they are only offering cloud servers out of it. If they one day offer dedicated servers in the 'states you can bet I'd be a customer. I am fairly unhappy with OVH's ipv6 situation.

I've been pretty happy with them! I've been using both dedicated/cloud since before the jump to the US.

IPv6 with Hetzner is a little weird, but you do get a full /64 to assign as you see fit.

I can't recall exactly but the SLAAC/DHCPv6 situation seemed a little funny. It only matters if you want to configure networking differently (eg: change from NetworkManager to systemd-networkd)

In doing so you don't benefit from these profile helpers that come preinstalled, I think essentially making the cloud server its own default gateway (if memory serves)

Anyway, I'm also eagerly awaiting US dedicated. While my workloads don't mind the latency to Helsinki, I do

Hope this filters down to their cloud / VM offerings.

That’s the 3rd big win for Ampere. Already in Google and Oracles clouds

Also in Microsoft Azure. So this is 4th win.

The main companies that are missing from their customer list are Amazon and Alibaba.

Both Amazon and Alibaba, have their own 64-big-cores or 128-medium-cores ARM server CPU designs (the 80 or 128 cores in Altra are medium cores), and both designs are superior to Altra in performance and also in ISA level support (Amazon Graviton 3 supports Armv8.4-A with SVE, while Alibaba Yitian 710 supports Armv9.0-A with SVE2).

It remains to be seen whether the custom ARM cores on which the Ampere design team works for their next CPU generation will succeed to leapfrog the CPUs of Amazon and Alibaba (which are using cores licensed from the ARM company).

Any Ampere vs M1/M2 comparisons I wonder...

Quickly, what I found on Geekbench browser. 80 core Altra vs. Macbook Pro M2: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/15913010?baseli...

Pretty much as I expected with M2 winning single core and Altra winning multi. But if you look at the individual multicore tests, certain ones the M2 seems to be optimized for (camera, PDF rendering), and it blows away Altra. Probably the audio-video-photo units on the M2.

Really not the best comparison, imo, because they are built for different ends. Still interesting

They are definitely not the first

https://www.ikoula.com/en/dedicated-server/raspberry-pi-4-mi...

Scaleway was the first to offer ARM based servers (non dedicated)

https://blog.scaleway.com/scaleway-become-the-first-arm-base... (2015)

They should up the network to 10 GBit/s. Given the price and specs of those servers, one can build a powerful bare-metal cluster there...

Would be good if they offer it upfront or as an add-on during order

but currently you can request it as referred here https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-info...

Right now the option you’d usually use for 10G to the internet doesn’t say it supports RX-line servers.

If you search for “10G dedicated uplink” and look in the rightmost column it covers what they will support requests on.

I’ve successfully used it on AX and SX many times and I’d be happy to see Hetzner also support RX!

I'd also probably order the 10G for that price if it was just a checkbox in the order process. But opening a ticket later (and downtime for the server), or waiting substantially longer for the server to be available isn't really an option for me. I'm wondering if they deliberately do that because their switches couldn't handle too many 10G servers?

Didn't OVH/Soyoustart offer ARM based systems a few years ago?

I faintly remember ARM Cortexs back in 2015 or 2016.

Was really excited to see something more reminiscent of the Scaleway era -- small 4-16 core ARM boxes with modest memory/storage/network

Not quite sure how to phrase my reaction. Not really disappointed, but I suppose confused. Something this beefed up I'd probably rather have Epyc

This is not true. I had an ARM based server from scaleway in Paris years ago.

These guys have been doing it for a while now: https://vboxx.eu/mac-hosting

Hetzner has also been offering arm based macs for a while now. Maybe they don't include them in their definition because technically they're not servers?

They're not really any different to a Sun pizza box and we used them as servers back in the day :)

But I believe the mac mini doesn't have ECC Ram? I've had pretty bad experiences with non-ecc for database servers. It probably doesn't matter as much if you're only processing data where a bit flip isn't problematic or where data isn't stored aftewards (e.g. web server), but for data manipulation I wouldn't use non-ECC.

I would like to get just a few cores. No need for 80 cores at full time. Primary use case is compiling Java apps to native binaries using graalvm.

I am sure a Hetzner Cloud server offering based on this is a given, might just have to wait until next year.

Then wouldn't a VPS be good enough?

Can't you cross compile these apps?

OCI sells Arm-based bare metal servers too.

Several low end providers have offered Raspberry Pi hosting in EU and elsewhere for quite a while.

What are the best payloads for these servers? What applications can utilise 80 ARM cores well?

crypto miners of course ;)

I do not think any relevant cryptocurrency is using CPUs anymore. Further, most of the top blockchains now run on proof-of-stake consensus.

I had really great experience using SAT solvers on these machines. It was a dual socket 80 core ampere system https://twitter.com/Anno0770/status/1527414408242155523?t=AV... .

Pretty sure mythic beasts has been offering raspberry pi servers for some time.

Hmm, I expected it to be cheaper. Maybe when they launch a VPS based on ARM.

"the low price of € 169 a month and € 179 setup fee"

Yikes. Although it is 80-core, 128GB, I suppose.

It is not that pricy if you look at the beefiest intel/amd machines. However you really have to get better performance from these to justify the price. Unless core count is somehow more important to the specific use case.

I suppose a simple server with very little computing (web, irc, stuff like that) should benefit from this

Much cheaper than a comparable x64 machine. But only if you can use 80 cores.

Using 80 (or x) cores is pretty easy in any web (or network) workload where non blocking multi threading is the norm.

The prices seem reasonable for a dedicated server.

That means a little above EUR 4000 for 2 years, which is around the minimum that would be paid for a server with Epyc or Xeon of similar capacity (when you assemble it yourself, at Dell or HP it would be much more expensive).

The equivalence with Epyc/Xeon also depends a lot on the intended applications, for scientific computing a 32 cores/64 threads Epyc/Xeon might have a similar performance, while for a Web server or database server a 64 cores/128 threads Epyc might be needed to exceed the performance of the 80-core Altra CPU, and a server like that might cost as much as 4 years of renting.

So if you buy your own server and you use it for at least 5 years, then you would certainly spend much less than when renting.

However, renting a server like this can cost less when you are not certain over long-term perspectives and it also has the advantage that there is no large one-time payment.

You're comparing price of buying vs renting with power/network/etc. included in cost ?

I have just compared the price of buying.

Adding the electrical energy cost will tip the balance towards renting, but the energy cost varies a lot from place to place. For a server so expensive it is likely that the energy cost over its lifetime will be a relatively small fraction of the buying price.

The energy cost becomes much more important for those who buy 1000 servers at heavily discounted prices.

The price for the Internet link can vary a lot and I do not think that it is included in the rental price quoted above. I believe that it will be paid separately, depending on requirements, and it is likely that it would not differ much from what you would pay when having your own server.

What you're describing is colocation and it's not cheap. Hetzner also take care of the hardware for you, if there is anything wrong with hardware they fix it.

If someone needs colocation, i.e. the rental of a space for the server, then that will of course increase the likelihood that renting a server is more advantageous than buying a server.

However there are many who have their own server rooms, so they do not need to rent any extra space for a server.

From what I understand the 1GB/s uncapped internet connection is included in price.

Google Cloud offers Ampere servers in multiple regions under label T2A for quite some time now and probably Alibaba Cloud / Huawei Cloud (haven't verified) and others

None of these are European companies. It already matters to some today, but due to policy pushes within Europe over the next 10 years it is going to matter to a whole lot more

that's a point that many (too many) people misses right now. it will cause a lot of problem. If someone is able to reproduce (somehow) what AWS / Google does fro cloud, but with an EU company, they will have a lot of new customers very soon.

It's a common confusion, but when you contract with Google Cloud, the service is provided by "Google Cloud EMEA Limited, Ireland", which is an European company, and when they provide you with a datacenter in Europe they are totally an European company operating in Europe.

This is different for example to DigitalOcean LLC, that is a US-entity providing service to European customers (this example has to be verified, but that's what I remember).

This is a distinction that will be increasingly lost on EU regulators, more so than it already is today.

It is lost on regulators due to CLOUD act. The parent company still can access the personal data stored by subsidiaries.

Google Cloud EMEA Limited, Ireland is subsidiary of US entity. It could just as well could be a US company with respect to privacy laws and regulations.

Do they offer dedicated servers?

AFAIK, Google's Bare Metal offerings are Intel only.

They only offer virtual servers, not dedicated servers. In the end it shouldn't matter too much, but dedicated servers tend to be much cheaper.

Also some people might prefer dedicated over virtual for whatever reasons.

It can be an extra layer of security. At some point in the future there will probably be another exploit in supervisors or hardware that can be used to spy on other tenants. With dedicated servers that becomes harder.

I've heard of large companies that require their own hosts. But then again, if you're big enough it really makes sense to build your private cloud anyway.

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