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Looking to fuel the datacenters of businesses, server blade (define) pioneer Egenera Inc. Thursday unveiled the latest iteration of its processing blade to coincide with Intel's new Xeon 2.80 GHz chip.

Egenera's embrace of Intel's new Xeon 2.80 reaffirms their partnership. Most server blade vendors are leaning on Intel to make the low-power, cooler processors. Launched Wednesday, Xeon 2.80 was designed for workstation and front-end servers, featuring one or two processors. They will be used to facilitate Web hosting, data caching, search engines, security and streaming media applications.

Combining reliability and manageability aspects of a mainframe, Egenera's BladeFrame assembles hardware and management software in a computing platform that allows datacenters to achieve savings and increase application availability.

Egenera's products are designed especially for running Red Hat's Linux operating system, where the BladeFrame creates a pool of up to 96 Intel processors on 24 hot-pluggable Processing Blades interconnected via a speedy internal network.

Whereas some customers may be concerned that new server blade versions may render previous versions obsolete, Marlborough, Mass's Egenera assures the world that this is not the case. As Intel creates new chips, Egenera's architecture makes it possible for customers to eliminate forklift upgrades by replacing individual Processing Blades, as opposed to the whole system. In turn, multiple processor and OS generations can run simultaneously on a single BladeFrame, protecting earlier investments.

Egenera's blades house no local disk and are therefore anonymous and interchangeable, which lets datacenters adjust processing capacity without purchasing, installing or managing incremental equipment.

Thursday Egenera had bold words for the competition, which includes Compaq, HP and IBM.

"While legacy vendors talk about delivering enterprise-class blades that perform like real servers, our BladeFrame system--which features both two-way blades and the industry's only four-way bladed servers--has been running mission-critical production applications since we started shipping last fall," Susan Davis, vice president of product marketing and management at Egenera.

Server blades are garnering favor with many financial institutions and life sciences organizations looking to save space. The thin servers-on-cards slide into a chassis, cutting down messy Ethernet cables. They also run lower power processors tham major servers, and therefore consume less energy and produce less heat, outlasting traditional server form factors.