Start-up Scali is gaining steam in the Linux clustering market with the introduction of management software.

The company, which was formerly focused on building clusters for academic institutions, is now bringing its software to commercial enterprises. Scali has been in business for more than eight years and was founded by Hakon Bugge, a veteran of Dolphin Interconnect Solutions. The company is funded by Intel Capital, Atlas Ventures, Four Seasons and Kongberg Gruppen. Scali has partnerships with IBM, Dell, Red Hat and Novell, among others.

Scali is enhancing two of its products - Scali Manage and Scali MPI Connect.

Scali Manage provides a single point of management for heterogeneous server clusters, as well as configuration services. MPI Connect allows customers to implement Message Passing Interface, a standard protocol adopted by companies building parallel-processing environments.

With the Scali Manage/Storage tool, users can install and configure the file system for a cluster. The first file system used will be Lustre from Cluster File Systems. The tool deploys all the software needed on the Lustre metadata server and compute nodes. It then validates the system to make sure it works.

Once Scali Manage/Storage is installed, IT can monitor the storage nodes to ensure they are operating correctly.

In the past, customers have used direct-attached storage for their compute-intensive operations, and the data fed into clusters was not large. With clusters becoming prevalent in financial and biotech organizations, customers are now connecting their clusters to storage area networks, which store the large data sets that are generated.

Scali Manage has also been enhanced to allow for capacity planning. IT can set parameters to capture historical data and set alarms that will trigger when an event occurs.

MPI Connect has been improved to automatically failover from a high-speed interconnect like InfiniBand to an Ethernet interface.

Scali supports any x86 processor, interconnect technology such as Myricom’s Myrinet or InfiniBand, and any version of Linux. Scali clusters can consist of thousands of nodes.

Scali Manage costs $598 a node; Scali Manage/Storage costs $1,900 per node. MPI Connect is $299 per node.