RLX rounds up cash, new customer

RLX makes progress as blade server software-only vendor

RLX last week scored $9.1 million in funding and a deal with server blade manufacturer Nexcom to distribute its management software.

Since becoming a blade server management company and abandoning its hardware-based server blades, RLX has been looking for manufacturers that want to bundle its management software with their blades.

Nexcom will start shipping RLX’s Control Tower software with its Nexblade servers as soon as the second quarter of this year.

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RLX last week scored $9.1 million in funding and a deal with server blade manufacturer Nexcom to distribute its management software.

Since becoming a blade server management company and abandoning its hardware-based server blades, RLX has been looking for manufacturers that want to bundle its management software with their blades.

Nexcom will start shipping RLX’s Control Tower software with its Nexblade servers as soon as the second quarter of this year.

RLX also received additional funding. Through August 2004, RLX had raised $118 million from Austin Ventures, Soros Equity Partners, Sternhill Partners, Ignition Partners, Comventures, First Dallas Ventures, Cockrell Investment Partners and ABS Capital. The newest $9.1 million is considered Series 1 funding for the reorganized company.

The company’s RLX Control Tower will carry both RLX’s and Nexcom’s names. RLX Control Tower is used for monitoring server blades, alerting IT of problems, and provisioning blade servers. It uses rules that an IT manager creates to automate much of these processes.

Control Tower has a number of optional modules to help IT staff manage blade servers in their environment. Among them are Provisioning Manager, Task Manager and Storage Connection Manager.

The Provisioning Manager lets IT install new applications and apply patches across multiple servers automatically. The Task Manager lets IT build tasks and processes that would be automatically performed on a scheduled basis. Storage Connection Manager lets IT staff monitor storage utilization and manage server blade-to-storage connections.

Nexblade servers include five Xeon processors per 1U of space. They also contain 10 blades per 4U chassis and three PCI-X or PCI-Express slots per blade. Nexcom has both single- and dual-processor blades and also blade PCs. The company also uses AMD’s Opteron processor.

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