High-End Blade Server Maker Egenera Backs Solaris 10

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems got some backing for its Solaris 10 operating system this week from an unexpected source: Egenera, the high-end blade server and virtualization specialist that has for several years been targeting the core financial services and telecommunications market where Sun gets a lot of its money with Windows and Linux blades. Now that Egenera has agreed to support Solaris 10 on its X86 server blades, Sun and Egenera can turn an adversarial relationship into a partnership.

Susan Davis, vice president of product marketing at Egenera, says that the company had only decided to ponder the possibility of supporting Solaris within the past several months. In its target markets, Egenera is trying to target a lot of Solaris shops with Red Hat's or Novell's Linuxes or Microsoft's Windows alternatives on its BladeFrame system, and it would undoubtedly be a lot easier to do this by pushing Solaris on the BladeFrames with Linux or Windows as alternatives on the box if customers want or need it. But Solaris support is more than that. If Egenera was not convinced that Sun was really betting the company on Solaris and that it was going to be aggressive, it would not have bothered to support Solaris 10. The flurry of announcements and market activity around the Solaris 10 beta program, plus lots of queries from customers and potential buyers about Solaris support, convinced Egenera that it was time to do it, says Davis.

That said, Egenera will not be able to just roll out Solaris 10 support immediately. For one thing, commercial-grade Solaris 10 will not be ready for prime time until the end of January 2005 or early February 2005. Perhaps more significantly, Egenera has to weave Solaris 10 and its management and virtualization features into its own Processing Area Network (PAN) Manager software, which virtualizes in the BladeFrame system. That, says Davis, will push its support of Solaris 10 out into the second half of 2005. The company has just put together the engineering team to do the work, and will do it as quickly as possible.

The basic design of the BladeFrame has not changed that much in several years. The main BladeFrame consolidates 24 two-way or four-way server blades plus networking and storage into what Egenera calls a processor area network, or PAN. The BladeFrame is built from the ground up to provide high availability clustering and dynamic resource allocation across the blades in the chassis, and it has what is essentially a redundant SAN switching network (comprised of controller blades and switch blades) as the backplane connecting all of the components together. The company also sells a Bladeframe ES system, which is a six server setup that also supports two-way or four-way boards. Egenera sells two-way processor blades that have 32-bit Xeon DP processors (running at 2.4 GHz to 3.2 GHz) and four-way boards that support the 32-bit Xeon MP processors (running at 2 GHz to 3 GHz).

Egenera tends to launch new processor boards twice a year, and looks due to add support for the two-way "Nocona" Xeon DP, which is important because this Intel chip supports 64-bit main memory. Egenera announced this summer that it would deliver Itanium-based blades, which have 64-bit support, sometime in the late spring of 2005. While Linux and Windows are supported on the Itanium chip, Solaris is not and will not be unless something radically changes in the market. Sun has backed the 64-bit Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices as its core X86 platform, and Egenera's customers may force it to follow suit if they want to run Solaris in 64-bit mode on something larger than a two-way server. Intel is expected to roll out the "Cranford" and "Potomac" Xeon MPs with 64-bit memory extensions in early 2005. With the 64-bit Xeons, which run Solaris 10 just like the Opterons do, Egenera need not be pushed into supporting the Opterons. However, if Intel slips with the 64-bit Xeon MPs and AMD opens up a big performance gap between Opterons and Xeon DPs and MPs, Egenera may have to rethink its position. Davis says that customers are already making inquiries about Opterons, and that the company is giving it consideration.

Egenera filed to go public in June, and it has raised over $124 million in four rounds of venture funding. The BladeFrame concept was hatched by Vern Brownell, the former CIO at brokerage house Goldman Sachs. In March 2000, Brownell incorporated and set up a company with a staff of engineers in Marlboro, Massachusetts, and its first products became generally available in October 2001. David says that the company has 50 customers, mostly in the government, telco, and financial services sectors, and that some of these customers have as many as 40 fully loaded frames with 500 to 600 blades installed. The reason why these companies choose the BladeFrame is that it is fault tolerant and flexible, and allows customers to push average utilization up to 50 to 60 percent, compared to the 10 or 15 percent range that a typical server sees. Davis says that companies are also saving big bucks on administration, since the virtualization and management software embedded in the BladeFrames allows fewer administrators to handle a given number of servers. Moreover, at a big company with 10,000 servers, they might have 80,000 pieces of equipment to manage for those servers; with the BladeFrame architecture, Davis says Egenera can drive that number down to 5,000 devices to support the same workload.

Having agreed to support Solaris 10, it does not look like Egenera will be adding HP-UX support soon, even though technically Egenera could work out a deal with Hewlett-Packard to put HP-UX on its future Itanium processor blades. And even if, by some miracle of market pressure, HP ported HP-UX to Xeon-64s and Opterons and IBM did the same with AIX, Davis says that Egenera probably would not support these operating systems on its BladeFrames because its customers have not been asking for it. "I can't say that we will never do it," says Davis. "But we have no plans to expand beyond Windows, Linux, and Solaris."

On a separate note, Davis took issue with a story we ran a few weeks ago that profiled a Grid to Go cluster of InfiniBand switching gear offered by Topspin Communications. In making its comparisons, TopSpin said that its full rack Grid to Go package plus 24 Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers would cost $130,000, including its VFrame virtualization software. TopSpin claimed that an Egenera system with 24 server Xeon blades, two control blades, two switches, and software licenses would cost around $1.5 million. "TopSpin neglects to mention that an accurate comparison to their prices would need to include full redundancy of all competitive components as well as numerous software products to provide provisioning, clustering, disaster recovery, multipathing, load balancing and virtualization," says Davis. "The BladeFrame includes all of these capabilities in one integrated platform."