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Egenera BladeFrame ES

If you're running 1U rack-mount Intel servers, it's unlikely an Egenera BladeFrame will save you space. But if you're replacing Unix systems, it's worth investigating--many organizations care as much about conserving data center space as they do about sheer processing power.

The BladeFrame ES sports a CLI and a GUI, both capable of performing the same functions. I preferred the GUI for ease of use but encountered many problems with blade control, and the GUI seemed to be confused about whether a blade was in a manageable state. Generally, disconnecting from the GUI and reconnecting cleaned up these discrepancies.

The Egenera "P-Blades" (Processing Blades)--the blades that run your applications--require an external disk source for booting. Egenera was kind enough to supply me with a SAN array that was prequalified for working with its blades, and for my purposes all went well. But the P-Blades do not boot any OS locally. Egenera has drivers for various versions of Windows and Linux, so your x86 OS of choice should be usable, but if you are running an odd version of either OS, check with Egenera about compatibility.


Good

• High-end x86-based blades

• Multicore Opteron support
• Highly virtualized

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