Blades with an edge

BLADES DECONSTRUCT the enterprise server to the bare minimum -- processors, memory, chipset, hard drives, and network interfaces -- mounting all on a circuit board that's stuffed into a high-density rack-mount enclosure. The enclosure provides power and management and allows an entire server to act as a hot-swappable, field-replaceable unit.

This means real benefits. Servers consume far less physical space, thereby requiring fewer racks; the servers consume less electricity, saving power and operating costs; and if implemented properly, the servers are also easier to manage than their traditional 1U-high or larger counterparts, both individually and collectively. Plus, swapping out a bad blade is an order of magnitude easier than deracking and reracking a traditional server.

The challenge for blade vendors is to increase density and improve manageability, while packing as much reliability into a blade as possible. That's where RLX Technologies comes in: The company's ServerBlade 1200i server, System 300ex enclosure, and Control Tower 4.0 management system are simply the finest executions we've seen on the blade premise.

The meat of a blade system is the server. RLX offers a variety of blades (including two models based on Transmeta's Crusoe processor), but the one we reviewed, the ServerBlade 1200i, is the flagship of the company's fleet. Think of it as a beefed-up laptop motherboard, without a keyboard or graphics chip but with a 1.2GHz Intel Mobile Pentium III processor and one DIMM slot (for a maximum 2GB of RAM).

Although the 1200i is available diskless, there's a built-in ATA-100 disk controller and room for two 2.5-inch hard drives (ranging from 20GB to 60GB). Applications can use two Fast Ethernet NICs; a third is provided for management. There's also a front-mounted serial port for a debug console.

The 1200i is a good, basic server, but far slower than many modern servers that boast one or two multigigahertz Xeon processors. Forget using 1200i blades for data mining, but they are adequate for Web serving, domain controllers, and so on, especially when clustered or load-balanced (see " F5 balances blade loads "). In many ways, the individual servers are comparable to HP's ProLiant BL10e blades, except that the RLX blade supports two hard drives, while the HP blade offers a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse switch).

The RLX 1200i blades are most beneficial when running Linux. There, the server's lack of keyboard, mouse, and monitor would be considered an asset, not a liability. We were sent two blades with Red Hat Linux 7.3; they were fast and reliable, and we were perfectly able to work with them via SSH (Secure Shell). In fact, the entire RLX system was easy to install, configure, and operate.

Although RLX supports Windows 2000 Server and sent us a blade with that operating system configured for remote command-line access, a Windows server is best managed with a graphical console. Windows is also less happy working with a network-based CD-ROM for software installs, and since the RLX servers lack a USB connection or any other way of directly controlling a CD, that's another strike.