The Boston Viridis ARM based servers will use the Breeze tool of Cambridge software company Ellexus to migrate x86 applications to ARM.
"Our software, Breeze is being promoted by Boston and ARM as a tool to ease the migration from x86 to their new Viridis ARM servers," Ellexus CEO Rosemary Francis, tells EW, "Boston have launched a cloud service where companies can rent time on a remote ARM server and use Breeze to migrate their applications across. This helps software companies keep their costs down when becoming 'ARM ready' as well as providing an evaluation platform for IT managers considering a purchase in a 'try before you buy' approach."
ARM micro-servers usually come with some flavour of Linux installed. Many of the more popular distributions have released ARM builds with pre-built tools. Ubuntu and Fedora already have 20,000+ applications and libraries.
Ellexus says that people who have developed their own software will have to recompile it for the ARMv7 architecture. For builds that employ commonly used tools such as GCC and GNU Make, few changes may be needed to the build process, but even simple changes, like updating library paths can be tricky.
"When setting up a new system there is always room for tiny differences that can cause a problem," says Francis, "Breeze can show you what those differences are and solve your problem quickly. Breeze can trace your installation or build process on your old system and on your new ARM server and show you what is happening inside the build. Breeze visualises your program hierarchy and captures details such as program arguments and dependencies."
Boston is launching what it calls its AaaS service (ARM-as-a-service) based on the Ellexus x86-to-ARM software of Ellexus.
