ClearCube retrofits management software

ClearCube, a vendor of bladed PCs, last week announced software intended to let even the most inexperienced administrator manage ClearCube’s blade environment.

The company introduced Control Center and Grid Center, two software products that give administrators a graphical console from which to dynamically allocate resources, monitor system health and receive alerts on potential problems.

In ClearCube’s bladed configuration, the processing unit is located in a data center. It connects to a device called an I/Port on the users’ desks, which attaches to monitors, keyboards and mice. Because the PC itself is located in the data center, it can be easily managed and swapped out if problems occur.

Control Center gives administrators a single management view of user desktops. It has the ability to boot, shut down or reboot PC blades, monitor the health of those blades and simplify the scripts that manage the blades.

Grid Center lets administrators allocate I/Port users to pools of PC blades. It also simplifies user logon and allows administrators to switch users from one blade PC to another if maintenance needs to occur on a blade.

In addition, the company’s Blade Manager is no longer based on LANDesk management software. Blade Manager is integrated with the ClearCube Switch Manager for out-of band monitoring of factors such as CPU temperature, voltage and fan speed. It complies with the Common Information Model and Desktop Management Task Force standards.

The company’s Switch Manager has been improved with the addition of management of the fans and power supplies and enhanced security and logon features.

Further, its Data Failover technology, which is a backup-and-recovery tool for blades has new features including management, visualization and more efficient settings capture.

Both Grid Center and Control Center are available now. They are part of the ClearCube Management Suite, which costs $289 per blade PC. Switch Manager, Data Failover, Move Manager and Blade Manager are also part of this suite of software.