Egenera and Turbolinux Partner to Offer PowerCockpit on BladeFrame

Egenera and Turbolinux announced this week that they have committed to a multiyear partnership to make Turbolinux’s recently unveiled PowerCockpit software available on Egenera’s BladeFrame offering.

Under the terms of the agreement, Egenera will package and resell PowerCockpit as a preinstalled option for BladeFrame, its server blade product.

Egenera and Turbolinux announced this week that they have committed to a multiyear partnership to make Turbolinux’s recently unveiled PowerCockpit software available on Egenera’s BladeFrame offering.

This is the first such agreement the Linux vendor has made for PowerCockpit.

PowerCockpit is scheduled to be available as a preinstalled add-on for BladeFrame customers by year-end 2001. It is currently being beta tested by one of the original BladeFrame beta testers.

PowerCockpit, announced in early September, enables a system administrator to configure a Linux solution. It then takes that software stack “image” from the fully configured server and places it in an image repository. Once in the repository, PowerCockpit can dynamically configure and deploy the image. Images from the entire stack of software images can be used, including those from middleware or low-level applications.

Although version 1 of PowerCockpit supports only Linux-based images, future releases will support other OS images.

The server blade market has exploded in recent months, with some companies launching and basing their entire business around a blade product and other, more-established vendors entering the space as a way to add to their product offerings.

Egenera has attempted to differentiate BladeFrame from other server blade products by designing the product around its Processing-Area Network (PAN), which integrates hardware, software, networking, and services to consolidate, simplify, and virtualize the allocation and management of processing capacity.

BladeFrame consists of up to 96 server-class Intel processors consolidated into a 24x30x84-inch chassis that can contain up to 24 two-way or four-way SMP processing resources (Processing Blades), redundant central controllers (Control Blades), redundant integrated switches (Switch Blade), and a redundant high-speed interconnect (BladePlane). The PAN Manager software comes preinstalled.

BladeFrame uses Intel processors and the Red Hat Linux operating system.

BladeFrame is Egenera’s first product. Version 1.1 began shipping in October after two months of beta testing. BladeFrame is priced starting at $250,000 and comes with a one-year warranty of service for both the hardware and software.

When released, PowerCockpit will be priced at $2,400 for a 10-node license (or in the case of BladeFrame, a 10-blade license).