A Russian startup company is developing a technology that will allow data centre owners to migrate software designed for x86 platforms to ARM-powered servers. The software,  by Elbrus Technologies will mean that companies di not have to recompile their software to make the switch. This means power hungry Intel chips could be cheaply replaced by companies wanting to shift to ARM.

Anatoly Konukhov, the chief business development officer of Elbrus Technologies in Moscow said that it makes sense for many data center operators to consider switching to ARM-based servers in the future. The big problem is that many applications, specially proprietary, closed-source, ones are designed for the x86 CPUs won't work on ARM processors.

Elbrus Technologies is building an x86 to ARM binary translator application that will allow proprietary software compiled for the x86 architecture to run on ARM-powered servers without any changes. It is a software emulation that will be transparent to the user, Konukhov said.  It will detect when an x86 application is executed and will perform the binary translation.  At the moment development efforts are focused on supporting Linux servers and software. Support for Windows software is a longer term goal.

The project started in the spring of 2012 and the product is expected to be ready for beta testing in the middle of next year, Konukhov said. The final product will be released sometime at the end of 2013 or in the beginning of 2014, he said.

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