Canonical Announces Expanded Ubuntu Support for the Cavium Workload Optimized ThunderX™ Processor Family

Optimization for Deployment and Provisioning Cloud Based Workloads at Scale

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Jun 03, 2014, 07:01 ET

LONDON and TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 3, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Computex -- Canonical, the commercial organisation behind Ubuntu and the leading provider of support services for Ubuntu deployments in the enterprise today announced expanded support for the ThunderX SoC family from Cavium, Inc., (NASDAQ: CAVM), a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking. With this announcement Canonical builds on the strategic partnership that initially delivered Ubuntu 13.10 support on ThunderX in 2013.

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Canonical will continue to provide development and support for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release on ThunderX, as announced in April. Ubuntu is the first commercial-grade platform for ARM64 computing. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes Juju and MAAS to easily design, deploy and scale services faster than any other platform available today, on cloud or bare metal. Juju meets the DevOps imperative for agility, continuous deployment and integration, and MAAS provides scalable bare-metal deployment. With optimized integration for the ThunderX SoC Family, Ubuntu delivers the requirements of a true Hyperscale Data Center environment.

We believe the ThunderX SoC family will deliver an optimal combination of compute, storage, networking and security integration for the scale out cloud and cloud specific workloads. Canonical has demonstrated industry leadership in the cloud market and is the most widely used OpenStack distribution with its investment in OpenStack development and deployment. With today's announcement Canonical will be partnering with Cavium to optimize OpenStack for the ThunderX SoC family. This will include Cavium's participation in Canonical's OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL). The Lab runs over 3,000 OpenStack tests each week, using different combinations of Ubuntu, OpenStack and third party technologies, to provide customer assurance of interoperability and performance with their preferred solutions in private OpenStack environments.

"Cavium has proven to be a key partner for the Ubuntu community and Canonical. Canonical is a leader in the ARM software ecosystem and ThunderX™ allows us to truly showcase Ubuntu in the hyperscale server market," commented Christian Reis, VP Hyperscale at Canonical. "The Cavium team has demonstrated a strong commitment to open source development and upstream community engagement. We look forward to continuing to build on our partnership with Cavium."

"We believe our partnership with Canonical has demonstrated to the market what true collaboration is all about. The complement of Canonical's leadership in cloud deployment optimized for Cavium's ThunderX SoC solution we believe this addresses what today's data centers have been looking for," said Larry Wikelius, Director Thunder Ecosystems and Partner Enablement. "Canonical continues to demonstrate thought leadership in key server market segments and we believe our end users will benefit from this partnership."

The ThunderX product family provides the best in class 64-bit ARMv8 Data Center & Cloud processors, which we believe offer an unprecedented level of integration and industry leading ARMv8 SoC performance. With high performance custom cores, single and dual socket configurations, very high memory bandwidth, large memory capacity, integrated hardware accelerators, fully virtualized core and IO, scalable Ethernet fabric and feature rich I/O's that enable best in class performance per dollar and performance per watt. The ThunderX family includes multiple workload-optimized SKUs that enable servers and appliances that are optimized for compute, storage, network and secure compute workloads in the cloud. The ThunderX processor family is fully compliant with ARMv8 architecture specifications as well as ARM's SBSA.

About Canonical
Canonical is the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu project and the leading provider of support services for Ubuntu deployments in the enterprise. Ubuntu is a free, open-source platform for client, server and cloud computing. Since its launch in 2004, it has become a natural choice for users of all kinds, from Fortune 500 companies to hardware makers, content providers, software developers and individual technologists. With developers, support staff and engineering centers all over the world, Canonical is uniquely positioned to help its partners and enterprise customers make the most of Ubuntu. Canonical is a privately held company.

About Cavium, Inc.
Cavium is a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing in enterprise, data center, cloud and wired & wireless service provider applications . Cavium offers a broad portfolio of integrated, software compatible processors ranging in performance from 100 Mbps to over 100 Gbps that enable secure, intelligent functionality in enterprise, data-center, broadband/consumer and access & service provider equipment. Cavium's processors are supported by ecosystem partners that provide operating systems, tool support, reference designs and other services. Cavium's principal offices are in San Jose, California with design team locations in California, Massachusetts, India, Taiwan and China. For more information, please visit: http://www.cavium.com

Note on Forward-Looking Statements
This press release may contain forward-looking statements regarding future events that involve risks and uncertainties. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions and current expectations. Our actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions. The risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements include but are not limited to development of new products and technologies; quality and performance of our products; whether we are successful in marketing our products; the rate at which our new products are adopted; rate of new design wins; whether we continue to develop and maintain our collaborations and relationships with our ecosystem partners; product developments by our competitors; technological advances; pricing pressures; general economic conditions; manufacturing difficulties; and other risks and uncertainties described more fully in our documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. More information about these and other risks that may impact Cavium's business are set forth in the "Risk Factors" section of our Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 2, 2014. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof and qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement, and we assume no obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements.

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