Egenera has ultradense blade servers on tap
 
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Start-up egenera's BladeFrame server is an ultradense, high-powered multiprocessing rack of servers that the company hopes will rival Unix servers from Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun.
BladeFrame boxes are aimed at enterprise customers and service provider data centers where power consumption, heat dissipation and cost per cubic foot are concerns. It suits the need IT data center managers have for compact, rack-mounted equipment that can be managed from a central location.
"The biggest pain is having expensive personnel wire, configure or make changes to the physical infrastructure," says Michael Carrier, CTO of infrastructure management firm Totality. "Egenera's box minimizes the amount of physical infrastructure management."
Egenera's BladeFrame consists of a rack-mount enclosure that contains up to 96 servers or blades. Each blade has two or four Intel Xeon processors and is manageable from a browser or command line interface egenera provides.
Each hot-swappable blade plugs into a backplane, which logically ties them together to form a single pool called a Processor Area Network. When blades are grouped, they create a virtual pool of processing power that can be dynamically reallocated and load-balanced as demands change. Redundant, fault-tolerant switches and controllers provide access to power, the network, storage-area networks and network-attached storage devices.
The market for blade servers is so new that statistics on market size are not yet available. So far, only RLX has introduced high-density blade servers, although Dell, Compaq, IBM and HP have announced plans to make them available before the end of the year.
In a typical configuration, the BladeFrame could be configured for a three-tier Web infrastructure, where several processors have Web serving responsibilities and others serve in the second and third tier as application servers and back-end database servers.
Each processor runs Linux, although the company claims it will support other operating systems in the future. The BladeFrame will ship this fall.
Egenera is at www.egenera.com
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