RLX doubles the power

Systems vendor RLX will announce multiprocessor server blades this week at the Intel Developer Forum.

The new blades will each have two Pentium 4 Xeon processors running at 2.8 GHz or 3 GHz. The RLX 2800i and 3000i have 512K bytes of memory and a 533-MHz front-side bus. As many as 10 blades can fit into RLX’s new 6U-high chassis.

Each blade contains two Gigabit Ethernet adapters. A separate Ethernet connection provides a management port. The blades also each contain ATA drives with either 60G bytes or 80G bytes.

RLX blades attach to network-attached storage. The chassis, which contains redundant power supplies and fans, is designed to accommodate future Fibre Channel connections to storage-area networks or InfiniBand connections for server clustering. The blades run Windows or Linux operating systems.

The company also introduced several management packages, which include ActivStat, ActivConfig and ActivManage.

IT managers use ActivStat to monitor on-the-blade statistics. An LCD located on the edge of each blade also monitors statistics. ActivConfig lets an administrator modify configuration information for each blade. ActivManage enables role-base security, limiting individual system administrators to managing, configuring or repairing only those blades that are associated with their work.

These ActivIT tools are also capable of managing non-RLX computers and can integrate with BMC Patrol or Tivoli enterprise management frameworks. A Control Tower XT plug-in is also available for RLX/Network Appliance filers, which lets administrators manage the filers attached to RLX blades.

RLX claims it shipped 6,000 to 8,000 blades in 2002.