HP Ships Control Tower for Linux Blade Management

Published: April 25, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last fall, server maker Hewlett-Packard bought the software assets of blade server pioneer RLX Technologies and said that it would take that company's well-regarded Linux management software for blade servers and port it to its own BladeSystem blade servers. Last week, HP delivered the first home-grown release of that software, which it calls HP Control Tower.

When I talked to HP last October, I was told that the Control Tower software would eventually be integrated into HP's cross-platform System Insight Manager software, which is HP's own management software for the BladeSystems as well as rack and tower versions of the ProLiant X64 and Integrity Itanium servers. But HP also said that it would work to get Control Tower tightly integrated on its Linux-based blade servers first because customers deploying Linux on blades were in need of better, easier management first. According to Lee Johns, director of the so-called "velocity software" unit at HP, which is an internal name for the management software for HP's servers and storage, well in excess of 25 percent of the blade servers that get installed are running Linux, and in many cases, these companies are deploying Linux solely. "There are cases where customers have very specific needs, and Linux is one of them," he says.

Control Tower uses a graphical interface that literally shows the blades in racks and you manage the machines by pointing and clicking and moving resources around on these pictures. As such, it is tied very directly to the hardware that is in the database behind Control Tower. And that means it cannot be deployed on non-HP machines--unless HP plans to add such support. Johns says flat out that this was not in the cards. If you want to manage non-HP blades--or, indeed, any non-HP servers--then HP wants you to use System Insight Manager. Basically, if it has an IP address, System Insight Manager can manage it. And while the HP release of Control Tower will allow customers to provision Windows blades, this is not something HP is emphasizing. "We expect the large majority of our blade customers using Windows will continue to use out existing Windows tools," says Johns, including System Insight Manager and the Rapid Deployment Pack provision tools that plug into this tool.

Perhaps more importantly, the Rapid Deployment Pack for Linux plug-in for System Insight Manager is being discontinued, so whether you like it or not, if you use Linux on blades (and probably on any HP iron in the long term), you are going to be getting Control Tower. Last October, when it bought RLX, HP quietly announced that the RDP Linux Edition 1.3 would be the last release of this software.

Johns says that a system admin using HP blades can get the Control Tower server up and running in about 30 minutes, and that it takes about the same amount of time to provision a complete Linux blade once Control Tower is running.

For those companies who already use System Insight Manager, HP has created a tool definition table and an XML script that allows settings inside Control Tower to be replicated into System Insight Manager.

HP Control Tower will be available in May for $199 per server node, with no fee for the management server (unlike RLX pricing). The software does not run on RLX blade servers. It supports the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server variants of Linux.

RELATED STORIES

HP Buys RLX for Linux Blade Server Management

RLX Exits Blade Server Biz, Focuses on Software