Egenera Blades Play It Cool

Egenera, a maker of blade servers that power utility computing systems,
today released the third major iteration of its BladeFrame chassis with new
cooling technology.

Blade servers are considered a popular alternative to Big Iron mainframes.
Instead of one big machine, some corporations have taken to incorporating
several modular blade server racks in their data centers, citing cost and
maintenance savings.

Egenera, along with vendors IBM, HP and Dell, are hoping to ride this modular
computing wave to increase server revenues.

The company’s BladeFrame EX includes a new blade configuration that doubles
the system’s previous performance and Ethernet connectivity.

The Control Blade, with eight fabric connectors (24 blades can fit in a
BladeFrame chassis), can offer almost triple the network performance and
double the disk performance of its predecessor, the Marlboro, Mass., company
said in a statement.

Moreover, the fabric bandwidth has been boosted to 10 gigabits per second.
The Control Blade can also be upgraded to support 4Gb Fibre Channel and
10Gb Ethernet, a couple additional performance perks at a time when
customers can’t get enough of them.

While the new BladeFrame EX machines are backward-compatible with
preexisting Egenera systems, a new “cooling” agreement with Emerson Network
Power helps ease the addition of performance upgrades.

In what the companies are calling the CoolFrame solution, Emerson Network
Power’s Liebert XD cooling technology has been sprinkled into the Egenera
BladeFrame EX system to allow customers to run servers in their data centers
without adding heat to their infrastructure.

The Liebert XD technology directly cools down a server rack, with a pumping
unit or chiller and overhead piping system. Flexible piping connects Liebert
XD cooling modules to the gear, making it easy to add modules or reconfigure
the blade server.

A single chiller provides 160 kilowatts of liquid-cooling capacity for up to
eight BladeFrame EX systems. The cooling modules do not impact the
BladeFrame EX system’s cable management features and add no power
requirements.

Together, CoolFrame and BladeFrame EX reduces the heat dissipation of the
rack to the room from as much as 20,000 watts to a maximum of 1,500 watts
without impacting the performance of the processor cores.

Such technology is a valuable perk because heat from servers can wreak havoc
on data-center equipment, limiting its longevity. Cooler data centers are
welcomed by CIOs concerned about budgeting for energy costs.

The CoolFrame solution will be available on BladeFrame EX by the second
quarter of this year.

In related news, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Egenera’s exclusive partner
in Europe, Middle East and Africa, has incorporated BladeFrame EX into its
Primergy brand BladeFrame.