Once upon a time I was working on the birth of EFIKA, one of the first affordable PPC developer boards (if not the first ever). This made PowerPC available to thousands of users and developers instead of just a chosen few. Later on, already as a hobby, I worked on EFIKA MX, an ARM-based board and laptop. I love anything non-x86 and have a nice collection of PowerPC and ARM hardware. But for the past seven years this was only a hobby for me, and $3000 is just too much for an ARM server board used only for a hobby. Ever since the first 64-bit ARM server chips appeared, I was begging for an affordable board, knowing that price is a very important decision factor and not only for me. Just think about the Raspberry Pi: over 8 million boards sold, making it the best selling personal computer in the UK.
The wait is over. Yesterday, Jon Masters of Red Hat at the Linaro Connect conference announced the Cello board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwPsZOBSQTc&feature=youtu.be&t=28m4s It is $300 and comes with a few compromises: only a single Gigabit Ethernet port and two SATA ports. Luckily it has a free PCIe slot, so it can be extended. Oh, and it also has a non-standard form factor (well, standard, but only for 96boards) making it difficult to find a case for it.
While the size is not an industry standard, the board is compliant to the ‘Server Base System Architecture’ (SBSA) specification. What it means in practice is that Linux can boot on it without board-specific modifications. It was demonstrated by Jon using unmodified RHEL 7.2 released last fall on a board released this year. While it is totally expected on x86, the ARM world was a lot more chaotic until now.
The syslog-ng application was available on the ARM platform for many years as part of different Linux distributions. Recently there is an increasing number of syslog-ng questions and requests related to the ARM platform. With this board I will be able to help syslog-ng users and also live for my hobby. :)