RLX Debuts New Xeon-64 Blades, Rack-Based Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

RLX Technologies was the pioneer of the commercial blade server concept in May 2001 when it launched blade servers based on low-power Transmeta processors, and the company has adjusted its products as many competitors have jumped on the blade server bandwagon. Back in August, RLX promised that it would deliver support for the 64-bit Xeon processors from Intel before the end of the year, and it has made good on that promise by launching its sixth generation of blades.

RLX sells two lines of blades, one that is designed to deliver the highest individual processor performance, and another one that delivers more physical processors per rack. The new blade is in the high performance category.

The SB6400 blade server is a two-way blade server based on Intel's 7250 chipset. It can be equipped with Xeon DP processors running at 2.6 GHz or 3.6 GHz, have up to 16 GB of main memory (400 MHz DDR2 SDRAM), and up to two IDE disks (30 GB or 60 GB capacities) or two SCSI disks (73 GB capacity). Each blade has dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a dedicated 100 Mbit Ethernet port that gives RLX's Control Tower 6G system management software access the blades. The blades support Red Hat's Linux Enterprise 3 and Fedora Core 3 and Microsoft's Windows Server 2003.

The new SB6400 blade plugs into the 610ex chassis, which is a 6U box that can house 10 blade servers that are mounted vertically (as most blade servers are to cope better with heat dissipation). The chassis also has room for integrated InfiniBand switches, which are provided by Voltaire. Prices for the new blade and its chassis were not announced.

RLX also announced two rack-mounted servers, the RM1100 and the RM1400. The former is a uniprocessor rack server in a 1U form factor that can use a 2.93 GHz Celeron chip with 256 KB of L2 cache or a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 chip (with 64-bit extensions) that has 1 MB of L2 cache; it supports up to 4 GB of DDR2 main memory and has room for two SATA disks. The RN1400 is a two-way, 1U server that uses the Nocona Xeons; it supports up to 8 GB of main memory and has room for four SCSI disks. Again, RLX did not announce prices for these servers.