Oracle Will Not Support ARM Servers Initially

Even if ARM says that it will be moving into servers soon, there will be some road blocks the company will have to clear.

Not only will ARM have to establish credibility, but it will also have to work to provide the necessary software support: Oracle recently said that it has currently no intentions to support ARM-based servers.

In a conversation with Techweek, Oracle said that it will focus on Sparc and Intel processors for the time being. “We are less passionate about architecture outside of SPARC and Intel … the importance is that togetherness across the stack, up the stack and horizontal across the stack,” said John Abel, chief technology architect for Oracle in the EMEA region.

However, Oracle noted that the company has a working relationship with ARM, just not in the server space. "Oracle absolutely does work with ARM. As such ARM is very much on the Oracle roadmap," a spokesperson said. "For example, Oracle’s support of Java for ARM is a relationship the company values highly."

While there is no reason to believe that ARM-based serverswill be commercially available before 2014, micro-servers based on power-saving ARM processors have captured quite a bit of interest. For example, Dell recently said that its Copper server is now given to partners in limited numbers for evaluation purposes. HP originally planned to also ship an ARM-based server code-named Moonshot, but eventually decided to run with Intel's Atom instead, at least for the initial release of the server.

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.

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