Egenera extends blades to remote offices

Egenera last week announced server hardware that simplifies management and boosts processing for users in remote offices.

The BladeFrame ES consists of six Egenera Processing Blade resources in a 17.5-inch-high rack-mounted chassis. It is focused on branch-office locations, call centers and remote sites that may not have their own dedicated IT professionals.

Each BladeFrame ES consists of six blades, redundant controllers and interconnect and virtualization software. Each diskless blade uses two or four Intel Xeon processors. In addition, the chassis contains a control blade and the BladePlane ES interconnect, which handle all Ethernet and disk I/O.

The control blade also features a DVD drive, ports for administration from a laptop and interfaces to external network and storage resources. Network-attached storage or Fibre Channel SAN storage can connect to the BladeFrame ES.

Each 1U high processor blade is managed via Egenera’s PAN Manager software, which allows the blades to be automatically configured and remotely managed. In addition, the PAN Manager monitors the health of the blades, allowing self-healing and recovery.

Each BladeFrame blade runs Red Hat Linux Advanced Server or Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition.

The BladeFrame ES starts at $90,000 for a SAN-enabled configuration. It is available immediately.