This is great news! CentOS needs to get its feet wet with ARM even if it's 32-bit to start with. This will kick off another growth wave in the lower end dedicated hosting segment with the target being individuals and very small businesses.
We're already offering managed ARM-based dedicated servers that are cheaper than our cheapest VPS plan. But we've picked Ubuntu 64-bit as the base. I'm looking forward to integrating CentOS 64-bit sometime/hopefully next year!
Me and lsc at prgmr.com have bantered about offering arm servers but the cost/wattage per core compared to xen guests still isn't competitive, plus we haven't found anything yet which supports ECC. If there was sufficient interest though we could try offering it. I already have a lot of experience with TI so we'd probably use the beaglebone black http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black Probably storage would be a combination of network (maybe usb) + the local flash for ephemeral data.
Maybe I don't know enough about the details of the RedHat/CentOS distinction, but if RHEL supports ARM, then doesn't CentOS automatically get that support for free?
Or is the CentOS project going to be adding extra functionality above and beyond RedHat?
Nothing is for free, but the article clearly states that the released RHEL doesn't have good enough ARM support, which means CentOS/RHEL 6 can't do ARM well.
If the CentOS project decides to take on ARM when RHEL is released, it's a matter of resources.
We're already offering managed ARM-based dedicated servers that are cheaper than our cheapest VPS plan. But we've picked Ubuntu 64-bit as the base. I'm looking forward to integrating CentOS 64-bit sometime/hopefully next year!