Egenera Upgrades BladeFrame Servers, Adds Cooling

Published: January 26, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Blade server maker Egenera this week took the wraps off its third generation of hardware, and also announced a partnership with commercial and consumer heating and cooling specialist Emerson to provide sophisticated cooling technologies for the new BladeFrame EX machines. Through a partnership with Liebert, a division of Emerson Network Power, Egenera will enable very high blade server densities while actually providing customers with a net savings in electricity costs related to cooling.

In making its announcements, Susan Davis, vice president of product marketing at Egenera, took a stroll down memory lane. Back in December 2001, the first generation of BladeFrame machines were based on two-socket Pentium III blades and ran only Linux, and the Processor Area Network Manager 1.0 software that was created to manage the BladeFrames was the real secret sauce that Egenera was hoping to peddle to solve severe system management and provisioning problems in the data centers of the world. PAN Manager 1.0 was cutting-edge at the time, providing an integrated tool for provisioning, monitoring, and managing virtualized server, network, and SAN resources, as well as providing high availability failover for Linux blades. In March 2002, Egenera offered four processor blades--the first in the server market--based on Intel's Xeon processors, and added a two-socket Xeon blade. Pan Manager 2.0 was also released at this time. The BladeFrame chassis supports 24 blade servers in a single frame. In May 2003, the company bolstered the I/O in the BladeFrame box and with PAN Manager 3.0, added support for Windows Server 2003 on the blades. That fall, Egenera launched the BladeFrame ES, which is a six server setup that supports its two-way or four-way blades. In the fall of 2004, Egenera's blades were boosted with 64-bit Xeon processors, and PAN Manager 4.0 was equipped with chargeback features (so the people who use resources can be charged for them) and integration with VMware's virtualization software. Last spring, Egenera added Opteron-based blades, and soon after added dual-core Opterons. And finally, as 2005 was ending, Egenera added support for Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 operating system. The Solaris support is key because the financial services companies that Egenera has been targeting--Egenera's founder is the former CIO at brokerage firm Goldman Sachs--with its BladeFrames are big Sun shops.

With the BladeFrame EX machines announced this week, the blades stay the same, which makes sense because both Intel and AMD are expected to make substantial changes to their processor lineups around mid-year. What is being upgraded first in the BladeFrame EX machines is the bandwidth of the fabric that lashes the elements of the BladeFrame together. Specifically, says Davis, the fabric bandwidth has been boosted to 10 GB/sec, which provides a 280 percent increase in network performance as well as a 230 percent increase in SAN performance based on tests that compared the new BladeFrame EX chassis to the existing BladeFrame chassis. Not only is the internal bandwidth either doubled or tripled, but the number of Gigabit Ethernet ports coming out of each frame has been doubled to 16. This bandwidth is necessary to balance increasing processing performance, the demands on SANs and networks, and connectivity between blades and to the outside world. Davis says that the BladeFrame EX box will support 4 Gbit Fibre Channel connections to SANs and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) links to the network; Davis says that these technologies will probably be available in late 2006 or early 2007. And, in keeping with its promise to protect customer investments, Davis says that existing blades will work in the new BladeFrame EX chassis. Customers merely swap out the redundant controllers and switches and the old backplane and swap in the new components. The PAN Manager software has to be upgraded as well with a maintenance release, and the whole process takes a couple of hours.

Pricing for the new BladeFrame EX frames is a few hundred thousand dollars for a base configuration, which Davis says results in providing customers of typical configurations more performance for the same or lower costs, depending on the switches they use. The baby BladeFrame, the ES model, has a base price of around $89,000, and it is still based on the second-generation backplane. The BladeFrame EX frames are shipping today, and customers will get them by default unless they specifically ask for the older technology.

While more bandwidth and the prospect of more powerful processors in the coming months are important, Egenera has partnered with Emerson Network Power's Liebert division to tackle what is becoming a much bigger problem than processor performance: heat density in the data center. And Emerson is a logical partner for this. (My best friend worked in an Emerson factory in New Jersey as a quality engineer for a number of years, and we always joked around that his rap name should be "Emerson Quiet Kool," which is probably the air conditioning brand name you know Emerson by.) Emeron's Liebert division has heating and cooling technologies that are used by every company in the Fortune 500, so company's know who Liebert is. Liebert rolled out the first precision cooling system for IBM's System/360 mainframes back in 1965, and a year later, Liebert created the very first uninterruptible power supply. Liebert has a 65 percent market share of data center cooling, and it introduced what it calls a variable capacity precision cooling system for data centers in 2004.

This system, called the Liebert XD system, gets rid of the idea of blowing cold air through the raised floor to have it sucked through servers to cool them, and then have that heated air sucked out of the data center and pumped outside. The XD system doesn't use air, but rather is comprised of a pump that interfaces with the outdoor chilling systems and special radiators that you attach to the servers. These radiators attach to the top or sides of the servers, and they are filled with an automobile refrigerant called R134A, which absorbs the heat and is then swiftly pumped out of the data center through a lattice of pipes overhead. This refrigerant is not water, which really messes up computers, but rather a liquid that gasifies when it is exposed to the air. According to Fred Stack, vice president of marketing at Liebert, the R134A can absorb heat as it undergoes a phase change, and that absorption means that the volume of this liquid is about one-fifth of what it would be if Liebert used water to chill the servers. The radiators and pipes can be moved around the data center, so as heat islands emerge, data center managers can attack them.

Customers who buy a BladeFrame EX from Egenera can buy a variant of the server called the CoolFrame, which embeds two radiators on the back of the BladeFrame EX racks, which can require 20 kilowatts of cooling when fully loaded. Each XD radiator can pull about 9.25 kilowatts each directly off the BladeFrame EX racks and take it directly out of the data center, which means the normal air conditioning in the data center only has to provide about 1.5 kilowatts of cooling. The XD pump hooks into the same outdoor chiller, but because of the efficiency of the XD setup, companies will be able to get by with a smaller chiller and also cut their electricity bill--probably about 22 percent less on the BladeFrame EX, estimates Stack. Liebert has installed the XD system at 120 customers and has installed about 1,500 radiator modules so far. Each XD pump, which is about a third the size of a CRAC (computer room air conditioning) unit, is rated at 160 kilowatts, which means it can provide cooling for up to eight BladeFrame EX racks.

Liebert and Egenera were a little vague on the pricing on the XD system, which they are selling together into Egenera accounts. If you already have an outdoor chiller, the XD system (which is comprised of the pump, the pipes, and the radiators) will comprise a few percent of the total cost of the Bladeframe EX solution.