Exclusive: BladeFrame EX slices, dices, dazzles

Disk is delivered in a similar fashion, with the Egenera drivers presenting each SAN LUN to a pServer as a native SCSI drive. Thus, no HBA drivers or WWNN (World Wide Node Name) is required for any server; the controller handles all communications with the SAN. From the OS point of view, each connected disk is a local SCSI drive. On Linux OSes these drives may be added and removed at any time.

Free IT resource Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) May 22-23, 2007 Sponsored by OSBC Free IT resource TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running. Sponsored by Microsoft Egenera BladeFrame EX Egenera, egenera.com Very Good  8.3 criteria score weight Interoperability 9 25% Management 8 20% Performance 9 20% Configuration 7 15% Scalability 9 10% Value 7 10% 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. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

Through the looking glass

Because the BladeFrame EX lacks any form of KVM, console access to the pServers is handled through standard serial communications. Each Linux pServer runs serial gettys to permit local access through the PAN Manager application and a Java terminal application. Windows servers are handled in much the same manner, with the Windows boot process driven by the serial console and Microsoft’s SAC (Special Administration Console) used to configure the OS. Further console interaction on Windows uses RDP for standard terminal services connections. Egenera’s modified Windows installer enables remote administration by default.

Administration of the BladeFrame EX is straightforward, with root-level admins able to grant access to pools of resources to other users without allowing those users to access core-level configurations. This form of delegated administration makes the BladeFrame EX quite modular in terms of serving multiple masters without the overhead of constant IT involvement.

Also of note in PAN Manager is basic application virtualization. This feature is limited to Linux and relies on the aforementioned hot-add SCSI disk capabilities and code that permits scripts to be executed when an application is moved from one server to another. The application and all supporting start/stop scripts must reside on a specific LUN that is moved from one running pServer to another and then is invoked automatically. For instance, a dedicated Apache installation with all configuration elements and Web application code could be moved between pServers in this fashion.

I did note some odd UI issues, such as the inability to name or comment specific LUNs, requiring the admins to know exactly what’s on LUN 5.0.1.3 rather than rely on a configurable name. Also, the relatively limited external network I/O may be a problem for some installations requiring more than 16-gigabit throughput from 24 blades, and disk I/O performance is based on the performance of the external SAN. It would be nice to see the next generation leverage 10 Gigabit Ethernet to achieve greater external throughput.

Overall, the BladeFrame EX is an impressive piece of hardware engineering wrapped in well-crafted management tools. It provides a solid method to reduce datacenter costs through the flexible allocation of processing, storage, and networking resources.