RLX Introduces New Server Blades And Management Capabilities

RLX Technologies

The company's latest server blade, the two-way 1200i, is based on a 1.2GHz Intel Pentium III processor, said Kim Elsey, platform marketing manager at the company, based here. This compares with the 800MHz processor used in the previous model.

The new blades also support up to 2 Gbytes of DDR memory and up to two 60-Gbyte hard drives on board, Elsey said. Available immediately, they fit in the current RLX chassis and can be mixed and matched with earlier RLX blades, he said.

The new blades are available immediately, with price for a one-way model with 256 Mbytes of memory and no hard drive starting at about $1,500.

The company also unveiled an enhanced version of its Control Tower management software, an application that gives the server blades provisioning, remote monitoring and control and other hardware and software management capabilities, said John Schmitz, marketing manager for the Control Tower line.

Version 4 of Control Tower supports role-based access control, which increases security, Schmitz said. With this capability, managers can allow certain users to access specific blades, and can give each user specific levels of authority ranging from being able to monitor usage to full control, he said.

Also new is improved software provisioning. Control Tower previously allowed a server image to be copied and deployed across hundreds of blades, but the new version allows the same to be done for single software packages, Schmitz said. For example, he said a new Microsoft Windows service pack could be quickly copied into each server blade without the need to replicate the operating system across all blades.

Control Tower, which is typically loaded on one of the server blades in a group to act as a management appliance, can now be loaded on two blades with failover capability, Schmitz said.

The software with one blade costs $2,999, and individual software licenses are available for $199 per blade. The fail over plug-in for Control Tower is priced about $500, Schmitz said.

Pat Brogan, director of channel sales at the company, said RLX still has a relatively few number of channel partners but hopes to have 60 percent of its sales going through the channel by mid-2003.

The company is planning to offer incentive programs to solution providers by year-end, including market-development funds, demand-generation programs and certification programs, Brogan said.

The goal is to find partners with specific market focuses. "We don't want a lot of overlap," he said.