Egenera Adds Opterons, Upgrades BladeFrame

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Under a partnership announced this week, chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices has garnered another server maker that will support its Opteron processors, and blade server maker Egenera has another arrow in its quiver with which to attack the vast installed base of Unix servers in the world. Egenera says it will deliver Opteron-based blades for its BladeFrame systems within the next 30 days. Egenera also put out Release 4.0 of its PAN Manager BladeFrame management software this week.

The support of the Opteron processor in the BladeFrames comes hot on the heels of Egenera's announcement in November that it would support the Solaris 10 operating system in its systems, giving it peer status with Linux and Windows. Sun Microsystems is very big on the Opteron chips right now, and the desire to push Solaris on Opteron on essentially the same core iron is important if Egenera is to compete for Solaris dollars. As Sun is fond of pointing out, on plenty of hairy code out there in the real world, the Opteron chips do a lot better in terms of performance than you would think, based on benchmark comparisons with 32-bit and 64-bit Xeons from Intel. In the markets where Egenera is trying to sell its BladeFrames (particularly in financial services, where number-crunching and hairy code is rampant), Egenera needs to support the Opteron. And because customers like to make choices, Egenera also has to support Intel's Itanium processors in its server blades, and it will do that sometime in the second quarter of this year.

Vern Brownell, founder and chief technology officer of Egenera, did not provide the feeds and speeds and prices of the future Opteron-based blades, but said that the company will divulge those details when the Opteron blades start shipping in a month. The Opteron support will come just after Egenera has rolled out support for the "Nocona" Xeon DPs from Intel, which have 64-bit memory extensions; Egenera's two-way blades offer Xeon-64s running at 3.06 GHz and 3.2 GHz, as well as 32-bit Xeons running at 2.4 GHz up to 3.2 GHz. The four-way blades from the company are currently based on the Xeon MP processors from Intel, and run at 2 GHz to 3 GHz. Based on the Opteron architecture, the two-way Egenera blades will use the Opteron 200 series chips, while the four-way blades will use the Opteron 800 series.

No matter what Egenera blades a company chooses, they all plug into a BladeFrame chassis. There are two different form factors available: a rack-sized unit (the BladeFrame), which houses 24 horizontal blades like traditional rack servers (in terms of form factor, not function), and a smaller six-blade chassis (the BladeFrame ES), which mounts the blades vertically, like most blade server designs. These frames and chassis include networking and storage, as well as the secret sauce, the Processor Area Network Manager software, which provides high availability clustering and dynamic resource allocation across the blades in the chassis.

With PAN Manager Release 4.0, the core BladeFrame software has been enhanced in a number of ways. First and foremost, tweaks in PAN Manager now allow the modification of core server component settings--on the fly and without having to reboot a blade. For instance, you can change or add Ethernet NICs, disk drives, and DVD or CD-ROM drives, or you can change the server's name or boot policies. PAN Manager can also support EMC's PowerPath disk multipathing software. While PAN Manager already has disk multipathing built into its microcode and enabled on the BladeFrame's backplane, Brownell says that a number of customers with EMC arrays have already standardized on the PowerPath software and want to use that. PAN Manager 4.0 also includes hooks for supporting VMware's GSX Server virtual machine partitioning (VMware is owned by EMC, too). VMware's high-end ESX Server offers its nifty functions such as VMotion, which allows a running stack of software to be moved from one physical machine to another and allows a server to be carved up in such a way that partitions are a little more isolated. However, ESX Server is running at essentially the same level of the system as PAN Manager, so by default the BladeFrames can't support ESX Server. However, with GSX Server running on top of PAN Manager, the BladeFrames can give the functional equivalent of VMotion, providing automatic failover and load balancing across GSX Server virtual machines. Brownell says that the BladeFrames eventually will be able to support Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005, and that the company is closely watching the Xen open-source virtual machine partitioning alternative, which is ramping up to go mainstream.

PAN Manager 4.0 also supports SCSI-2 reservations, which will allow Microsoft's Cluster Server to run on the blades. And, finally, the software includes a feature that watches how every resource in the BladeFrame is used, and by whom, and dumps it into an XML file so they can create a mechanism for charging users specifically for the computing resources they use. This latter bit is intriguing to service providers and to those who want to go the next step toward real utility computing, says Brownell.