I just went searching for ARM servers last week...the options for white box systems are very slim. There are no Supermicro, Asus, etc. ARM rack mount systems yet, so you'd need to work out a deal with one of the few big name vendors with offerings in this space.
The costs seemed very high, to me, compared to whitebox/barebones AMD or even Intel based servers on a performance basis.
I think it is simply a function of them not being widely available cheaply yet. I wonder how they're getting them cheap enough to make this make sense...maybe quantity pricing is much better.
That's one of the big names I had in mind. They're pretty expensive for the performance you get. I'd choose a multi-core AMD or Intel...even when virtualized it's gonna provide more juice for your dollar, according to the math I did. Which is weird because ARM has come so far. I'm really wanting to try ARM on the server but the costs are still wrong. This is, of course, at least partly just because the barebones and white box manufacturers haven't entered the fray.
Memory capacity was actually my biggest cost factor that made a difference. You can buy x86 boxes with 256GB capacity for quite cheap. Up to 1TB for not outrageous amounts. The micro servers are designed for quite low amounts of memory... But memory is, by far, the bottleneck I am concerned with. CPU speed barely matters at all...so virtualizing CPU is fine as long as memory can be huge and fast.
Because Intel destroys anything ARM has to offer in terms of price/performance or performance/watt, even on microservers since the Avotons came out. We're also going to see Xeon D's and Denvertons before proper ARM based server solutions come to market.
