Start-up Egenera put a twist on blade servers in what may be a first in the industry - multiprocessor blades for enterprises and service providers.
Egenera, founded in March 2000 by two veterans of Goldman Sachs, is planning to ship its first system in the second half of 2001. Called the BladeFrame, each rack contains processor blades, a control blade, network and storage connections, and power. Blades with either two or four processors are available for symmetrical multiprocessing environments that need fast I/O and computation. Up to 96 processors can fit in a standard rack.
These blades operate as a virtual pool, creating what Egenera calls a processor area network. Servers within the pool can be dynamically re-provisioned to applications as necessary. Storage area networks or network-attached storage appliances are attached to the BladeFrame via a proprietary InfiniBand-like interface.
The Egenera BladeFrame runs Linux; other operating system support will be added in the future. Each blade runs its own instance of the operating system. The system is designed with no single point of failure - blades can be configured to failover to other blades, protecting applications and eliminating downtime, the company said. Processing blades can be hot-swapped and, if trouble occurs, a " phone home " feature alerts technicians.
The BladeFrame can be configured in a number of ways, by department or application. For example, users may partition the blades to form a three-tier Web infrastructure with a Tier 1 Web server, a Tier 2 application server and a Tier 3 database server.
A Web- and command line-based remote monitoring utility will be available for the blades that can hierarchically report up to systems management frameworks such as Tivoli Management Environment, CA Unicenter-TNG, HP Openview and BMC Patrol.
Pricing is not yet available.
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Deni Connor is a senior editor at Network World covering storage, SANs, Novell and Novell-related products. You can reach her at dconnor@nww.com.
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