Future of Xen Project: Video Spotlight Interview with Cavium's Larry Wikelius

With several companies introducing ARM servers recently, cloud providers and enterprise datacenters are excited to see new alternatives for reducing costs and power use come to market. Cavium, a semiconductor leader with a long heritage in security and wireless/ networking, entered the race with the introduction of ThunderX™ the industry’s first 48-core and 96-core family of ARMv8 workload optimized processors. To get to this point, numerous companies, developers and organizations, including Cavium, put great effort into the development of server software, standards and products to make ARM based SoCs a viable option in these environments. For Cavium, joining the Xen Project was a critical part of its work to advance the evolving ARM ecosystem. According to Larry Wikelius, Xen Project Advisory Board member and Cavium’s Director of Ecosystems and Partner Enablement, it has also been crucial to competing in this evolving market.

In our latest “Future of Xen” video, Larry says working with Xen Project hypervisor is an important requirement for certain customers. With many Cavium customers and partners already using the open source hypervisor, the company needs to not only support Xen, but commit to optimizing the hypervisor for private and public clouds as well as corporate datacenters. Cavium joined the Xen Project community last year and is pleased to see the Project dedicate significant resources and development cycles to ensuring full support, peak performance and efficiencies for ARM-based servers and SoCs. As a board member, Cavium is also able to shape the Project’s roadmap, ensuring it protects Xen deployments and a scale-out strategy to support cloud, telecommunications, Internet of Things devices, big data analytics and more. While the Project’s early commitment for ARM support is relevant, what’s equally important is the hypervior’s small footprint and the growing number of silicon vendors, software companies and end users investing in the Project.

So beyond scale out Data Center and Cloud deployments, what else is ahead for ARM-based servers and SoCs? Larry already sees the networking and carrier space mobilizing behind network function virtualization (NFV). Versions of its ThunderX chip aimed at (NFV) workloads as well as telecommunication, media, and gaming systems offer more I/O in general and security accelerators. Larry recently spoke about this topic at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit 2015 last month. Be sure to watch his video and check out slides from his talk to learn more.