Egenera Overhauls BladeFrame

Egenera took the wraps off its latest server, the BladeFrame EX, today, and also unveiled a deal with Emerson Network Power to cool its new blade technology. But for some users, the upgrade's pricing may be a freeze-out.

The BladeFrame EX sports a series of new control blades, which increase the basic connectivity of each server to sixteen 1-Gbit/s Ethernet ports. This is double the number offered on the EXs predecessor, the BladeFrame EP. The BladeFrame’s EX interconnect fabric has also been doubled, from 5 to 10 Gbit/s.

Compared to the BladeFrame EP, Egenera is claiming a 230 percent boost in SAN performance, although this figure is based on internal tests.

According to Egenera, the EX and the EP have the same price tag -- around $200,000 for an entry-level configuration. But EP users planning to upgrade to the EX are looking at a hefty upgrade cost of just over $100,000 to get the new controllers and software added to their exiting box.

Not surprisingly, execs tell Byte & Switch that the firm may "end of life" the EP as soon as a quarter from now, although the product will be supported for five more years.Existing users will be able to migrate the blades they're now using into the new box, Egenera maintains. “We’re not announcing any new processing blades,” says Susan Davis, Egenera’s vice president of marketing and product management. “All the new processing blades that customers have purchased today can go into the BladeFrame EX architecture... It’s essentially the addition of more wires and additional fabric connecting all this up.”

Egenera's dangling a financial carrot in front of existing BladeFrame EP users. "Discounts are available for upgrades as they are for any of the products that we sell," says Dan Busby, Egenera's director of product design. These discounts, he adds, will be relative to factors such as deal size and repeat business.

Seth Sladek, systems engineering manager at the Massachusetts-based Cambridge Healthcare Alliance (CHA) , a BladeFrame user since 2003, tells Byte and Switch that he is planning to acquire an EX. “The connectivity certainly has appeal,” he says. “It really allows us to get more throughput for heavy-duty production applications."

These applications include the likes of Microsoft Exchange and the organization’s key ambulatory care system. “It makes it a lot easier to troubleshoot stuff when you’re not aggregating bandwidth on links,” explains Sladek. “Most of these applications are sensitive to latency.”

Sladek adds that CHA’s existing BladeFrame will be used for disaster recovery when the new EX machine is deployed. As far as cost is concerned, it works out cheaper for CHA to run applications on the BladeFrame compared to IBM’s AIX platform, Sun’s Solaris, or HP’s HP-UX technology. “We’re running about 50 virtual machines on the BladeFrame,” explains Steve Doherty, CHA’s senior systems manager.Busby confirmed that the BladeFrame EX is aimed at large data centers, particularly in areas such as finance, federal government, and Web hosting, although he would not say how many early adopters are using the technology.

Egenera's also promising a series of add-ons for the new box that could motivate smaller firms and holdouts to make the leap, despite the price curve. The vendor plans to upgrade the BladeFrame EX to support 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel, although there is no specific timeframe for this. “While we don’t see [4-Gig] widely deployed yet, we think that at the end of 2006, early 2007, we will see it deployed in the data center,” explains Davis. The upgrade may even happen by the end of the year. “We’re waiting to see when customers will be ready for it."

Another incentive could come in the form of a solution to a longstanding blade server problem. The other part of today’s announcement involves Emerson Network Power, which owns the Liebert XD family of server cooling products. A gas-based cooling system, Liebert’s CoolFrame is one of a number of products aimed at dealing with the blade server heat wave. (See The Big Chill, The Heat Is On, B&S Insider Explores Blade Servers , and Data Center Heat Wave.)

Egenera and Emerson Network Power have integrated CoolFrame technology with the new BladeFrame, attaching two CoolFrame modules to the rear of the EX. The firms have also reached an agreement to reference-sell the technologies, although Steve Madara, vice president and general manager of Emerson Network Power’s Environmental Business Unit, won't say how much money has been pumped into the deal.

Emerson Network Power’s CoolFrame products will be available for the EX by the second quarter of this year, with prices expected to be around $300 per blade.It remains to be seen whether Egenera's improvements and future promised features will motivate blade believers who are looking for the next step up. But the vendor is charging hard to make the changeover. The EX will be a priority for resellers, including Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC), which signed on in October 2005 to resell BladeFrame technology in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. (See Egenera Cuts Big Blade Deal and FSC, Egenera Sign Deal.)

“This is actually the box they were most interested in selling,” Davis says.

— James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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