What happens when you take a blade chassis and remove the disk, NICs, HBAs, and state from the blades? You get the Egenera
BladeFrame EX. At first glance, the BladeFrame EX appears to be a standard datacenter rack populated with 1U servers, and
a few larger units near the middle. When you take a peek around the back, however, there’s no nest of Ethernet, FC (Fibre
Channel), KVM, and power cables; and there are only a few Ethernet and fiber-optic cables coming from the front of the rack.
So what gives?
Egenera BladeFrame EX
Egenera, egenera.com
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 Very Good 8.3 |
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| criteria |
score |
weight |
| Interoperability |
9 |
25% |
 |
| Management |
8 |
20% |
|
| Performance |
9 |
20% |
|
| Configuration |
7 |
15% |
|
| Scalability |
9 |
10% |
|
| Value |
7 |
10% |
|
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|
Cost:
Starts at approximately $300,000
Platforms:
Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Linux, Suse Linux, Solaris 10 for x86
Bottom Line:
Egenera’s BladeFrame EX is a model of tightly coupled hardware engineering and great design concepts. The management UI is
functional but lacks panache, and the overall solution lacks some small features you might expect to be present. Nevertheless,
Egenera succeeds in delivering a modular, high-performance, and highly adaptive blade server system.
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About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology
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Egenera has taken a unique approach to the concept of adaptive computing. Rather than pushing images around to physical servers
to achieve server mobility, the BladeFrame EX is populated with blades that have no local disk and no server state. These
blades are nothing more than CPUs, RAM, and cooling fans. All the disk and network I/O is handled by central switching modules,
and the server instances that run on these stateless blades are managed by central controllers. Scalent’s Virtual Operating Environment is similar to the BladeFrame EX in function, but it’s a software-only solution.
Egenera’s history dates back to 2000, with the first-generation hardware released in 2001. In the meantime, the company has
found significant traction in the banking, health care, and government markets, as well as installations in the private sector.
If you’ve ever used MapQuest, you’ve used a BladeFrame, albeit from the other side.
The BladeFrame EX is built into a 42U chassis, but the maximum population is 24 1U blades, although these blades are available
with two or four CPUs of AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon flavors. Maxed out, a single BladeFrame EX can house 96 CPUs and 768GB
of RAM. Sitting in the middle are the Control Blades and the Switch Blades. The Control Blades are essentially 4U servers
with multiple high-speed I/O connections: four 2 Gigabit FC SAN ports, four fiber Gigabit Ethernet ports, and four copper
Gigabit Ethernet ports. These ports comprise all of the rack’s external I/O capabilities, and they are duplicated on the second
Control Blade for redundancy. The Control Blades function in an active/active fail-over configuration, so a total of 16 gigabits
of external network I/O and eight 2 Gigabit FC connections are available, assuming that both Control Blades are online.
The Switch Blades handle all internal I/O for the entire chassis, which includes internal virtual switches, connections to
the SAN, and all backplane communications. The BladeFrame has no internal storage other than small disks residing in the Control
Blades, so all storage is delivered from an external FC SAN.
Making it real
The key to making this solution work is Egenera’s PAN (Processor Area Network) concept, which encapsulates Egenera’s stateless
approach to server hardware. Building servers on the Egenera platform is similar to building normal servers; installation
media is used to install an OS to a disk, and that disk is then booted to bring the server online. However, to make that server
stateless, there are a few different methods in the middle.
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