Verari snaps up MPI

Verari Systems, formerly known as RackSaver, last week acquired MPI Software Technology. Verari makes servers, workstations and blade servers, and will use MPI’s technology in its provisioning, management and virtualization software.

MPI is known for its work in server clustering. It has deals with Dell, RLX Technologies and Microsoft. Additionally, its customers include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Cornell Theory Center.

Verari, which changed its name to better reflect its focus on powerful blade servers, designs its products for high-performance computing environments present in companies such as Boeing, ConocoPhillips, Industrial Light and Magic and NVIDIA.

Verari makes two sets of blade servers – The UltraDense BladeRack and the MegaDense BladeRack. 

The UltraDense BladeRack has up to 132 processors and 132 blade servers in a seven-foot rack enclosure. It has room in the enclosure for networking gear and switches from vendors such as F5 Networks. The blades and fans are hot-swappable and use Intel Xeon, Pentium or Itanium processors and AMD Athlon or Opteron processors. 

The MegaDense BladeRack enclosure contains as many as 88 nodes and 176 processors. Like the UltraDense, it has room for network switches and its individual blades and fans are hot-swappable. It has direct-attached storage capacity of 66 terabytes.

Verari uses a thermal management technology called the Vertical Cooling System (VCS) to cool its systems. VCS cools blade servers from bottom to top rather than from front to back.

Verari’s management software tools, called BladeView and RackView, allow customers to remotely manage and monitor blade servers and rack enclosures. A third software product, called Felix, lets IT managers cluster and manage blade server clusters.

MPI ships a variety of management software, including MPI/Pro, ClusterController, Champion/Pro, Felix, SeeWithin/Pro and Cycles@Work.

MPI/Pro is clustering software that runs on Windows, Linux, Mercury and Mac OS X operating systems. ClusterController is job scheduling software for Windows; Champion/Pro is a version of MIP-2.1 for Linux; Felix is a Linux clustering tool for installing, configuring and managing Linux clusters; SeeWithin/Pro is a performance analysis tools for applications that implement the Message Passing Interface standard; and, Cycles@Work is batch scheduling and resource management software for Linux clusters.

Verari’s blade servers range from $100,000 to $300,000 for 44 blades. Enclosures are included. The blade servers are available now.