RLX boosts blades

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Blade server vendor RLX Technologies last week introduced a set of products to let IT managers simplify management and save money.

The company rolled out three server blades, a Gigabit Ethernet switch, a blade that attaches to IDE drives and a host bus adapter and gateway blade for attachment to storage-area networks (SAN).

The RLX ServerBlade 2600ie is a 2.6-GHz Intel Pentium 4 Xeon blade that has 512K bytes of cache; the ServerBlade2800ie has a 2.8-GHz Pentium 4 Xeon with 512K bytes of cache; and, the ServerBlade 3000ix has a 3.06-GHz Pentium 4 Xeon and 1M byte of cache. Each blade starts at $1,650.

The company also announced a single- and dual-ported IDE disk blade that connects to IDE drives.

Further, RLX announced a 20-port Ethernet switch called the RLX600ex Dual Gigabit Ethernet switch that costs $3,800. To add Fibre Channel storage to the company’s bladed architecture, RLX announced the FibreChannel SAN Interconnect and FibreChannel SAN Passthrough. The Interconnect is a 2G bit/sec Fibre Channel Host Bus adapter that lets 600ex-based blades connect with SAN storage. It is $1,000. The FibreChannel SAN Passthrough lets any RLX ServerBlade connect to external Fibre Channel switches. It is $1,100.

In addition, RLX announced a new version of its management software. RLX Control Tower XT Version 1.3 now manages both RLX blades and blades from other server vendors, as well as 1U servers. It starts at $2,500. The company also unveiled virtualization software called RLX HPC Cluster Manager, which allows the allocation or reallocation of clustered resources. It starts at $50 per server.

Products are available between now and November.