Cluster-management start-up aims at U.S.

Linux clustering vendor Scali last week announced it has received another $7.5 million in funding that it will use for product expansion.

The funds, which bring the company’s total to date to $20 million, will also be used to expand its marketing in the U.S. Presently, the Norway company has relationships with Dell, HP and IBM. Funding was provided by Atlas Ventures and Four Seasons Venture.

The company’s Scali Manage is cluster management software used to install, configure, manage and monitor high-performance clusters of Linux servers. Scali Manage features workload management as well as notification in the event of a failure in the cluster. The product supports all the major cluster interconnects – Myricom’s Myrinet, Dolphin’s Scalable Coherent Interface, Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand – and works with SuSE Enterprise Linux Server and Red Hat Linux.

Scali Manage includes installation and configuration support for operating systems, middleware, communications and third-party applications, as well as user data. This feature, according to Scali’s claims, saves time when setting up or reconfiguring a cluster.

The software works with Scali MPI Connect to support message passing interfaces (MPI) across a mix of vendors’ servers. It monitors and measures CPU load, disk space, fan speed and server temperature. In addition, it presents this information to systems administrators in two- and three-dimensional bar and histogram graphs. Monitored data can also be exported for use in other applications.

HP and Scali have partnered to produce clusters of Proliant servers, which are designed for work in bioinformatics, fluid dynamics and oil exploration. Scali Manage and MPI Connect support the ProLiant DL360 G2/G3, DL380 G2/G3, rx2600 and rx5670 servers.

Dell and Scali have partnered to provide a Linux cluster of 54 PowerEdge servers to the Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (GWDG), an organization that serves Germany’s largest scientific group, the Max Planck Society, and the University of Gottingen.

IBM resells Scali’s MPI Connect with its eServer 1350 Linux cluster. IBM eServer 1350 clusters support 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and Myrinet interconnects. Adding MPI Connect to the mix brings in support for InfiniBand and SCI. The e1350 cluster uses IBM eServer 325 and xSeries 335, 345 and 360 systems.

Prices for Scali Manage and Scali MPI Connect vary depending on customer requirements. Demonstration versions of the company’s software can be downloaded from: https://www.scali.com/index.php?loc=33