Egenera stuffs 64 GB of RAM on a single blade server

By Bridget Botelho, News Writer 07 Jun 2007 | SearchDataCenter.com

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With 64 GB of memory, the pBlade blade server will have more memory than any of Egenera's offerings and will be certified to support Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise and Sun Solaris 10 operating systems.

More on blade servers: HP adds blades to high performance computing portfolio Data center consolidation, virtualization: Ultra-dense server deployments Learning Guide: Blade Servers

Enterprises running Oracle, SAP and other high-end, mission-critical applications can take advantage of the new pBlade's large memory for enhanced performance and scalability. In addition, the expanding use of virtualization is driving requirements for more memory, as customers seek to consolidate many applications onto a single blade, Egenera reported.

Egenera will continue to use its standard 1U form factor for this new blade server. The new Egenera pBlade will be populated with four Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) Opteron Model 8220 SE dual-core processors at the speed of 2.8 GHz with 64 GB of memory.

Egenera pBlades are diskless and stateless processing blades within the Egenera BladeFrame System -- meaning the platforms have no "personality." This enables automated allocation, repurposing and failover since any server can assume the identity of any other server. The BladeFrame combines these stateless blades with Egenera's virtualization software.

A single Egenera system can simultaneously run processing blades with various processor architectures and operating systems.

A group of Ideas International analysts recently ranked Egenera blades among the top five best blade technologies currently available. In particular, the Ideas analysts appreciated Egenera's PAN architecture bringing the flexibility of a SAN to blade server architecture. Egenera's PAN manager allows administrators to create virtual pools of computing resources.

"I've seen blades from HP, Sun, IBM, Rackable Systems -- talked to all these engineers -- and thought Egenera's innovations were the best," said Jim Burton, Ideas' vice president and senior analyst of entry servers research. "They were the first to come out with blades and to virtualize everything, including the I/O and the processors, when other vendors weren't going down that route. Now the IBMs and HPs of the world are following their lead."

The 64 GB pBlade based on the AMD Opteron Model 8220 SE processor will be commercially available in Q2 2007.

Let us know what you think about the story; e-mail: Bridget Botelho, News Writer

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