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Ann Bednarz Company name: Suggests concepts such as "energy" and "next generation." Origin: Founded in March 2000 by Vern Brownell, former CTO of Goldman Sachs, and Ken Zolot, a former independent consultant to Goldman Sachs and an entrepreneur. Funding: A $30 million second round closed in July 2001, bringing the total to $50 million. Key investors: Austin Ventures, CSFB Private Equity, Goldman Sachs, Kodiak Venture Partners, Spectrum Equity Investors and YankeeTek Ventures. CEO: Vern Brownell. Product: BladeFrame multiprocessing blade server. Egenera's founders are well-acquainted with the trials of managing thousands of servers. The two collaborated on a number of IT projects, and the experience fueled their drive to create a blade server capable of distributing computer processing power like a utility. Released last September, Egenera's BladeFrame server accommodates up to 24 blades, each of which has two or four Intel processors, in an enclosure containing network and external storage connections. The blades can be hot-swapped and support dynamic reprovisioning so administrators can allocate processing power to applications on the fly.
Egenera's customers, which number in the "high teens," according to the company, include Credit Suisse First Boston and online learning infrastructure provider Blackboard. BladeFrame pricing starts at about $170,000.
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The buzz around blade servers is that they are faster to deploy
and easier to manage than traditional rack servers, plus they use less power
and generate less heat. With those perks, it's no wonder Egenera, in
Marlboro, Mass., faces competition in the blade server market from big name
vendors including Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM-spinout OmniCluster and
newcomer RLX Technologies. But whereas most available models are edge servers
for applications such as Web hosting, BladeFrame stands out with its application
server approach. It supports back-end database and financial applications,
and front-end applications. A limitation, at least for now, is that BladeFrame
only runs Linux. But Egenera plans support for Microsoft's .Net platform
late this year or early 2003. 
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