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February 21, 2002 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — RLX Technologies Inc. (rlxtechnologies.com), the a
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manufacturer of blade servers for Web serving and scale-out computing, has announced its RLX ServerBlade 800i. Distancing itself from the competition, the ServerBlade 800i features a new,
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high-performance architecture built around a low-voltage 800 MHz Intel Mobile Pentium III with up to 1 GB of DDR RAM.
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The ServerBlade 800i maintains RLX’s position as the recognized leader in
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blade-server computing. Comparisons by RLX with a leading competitor showed
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ServerBlade 800i had 800% greater performance per rack, 600% greater density
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per rack, 35% greater performance per blade, 70% greater system
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price/performance, 20% higher density and 24% lower acquisition cost, the
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company says.
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RLX also announced the RLX Control Tower Blade 2 server management and
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software provisioning system. Administrators can use it to remotely monitor,
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control and provision hundreds of ServerBlades in multiple chassis or racks,
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each running Microsoft Windows 2000 or Red Hat Linux. The ServerBlade 800i
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is being officially unveiled at the Spring 2002 Intel Developer Forum, where
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RLX offers a free seminar, “ServerBlades in Scale-Out Computing
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Architectures.”
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“Systems based on low-voltage Intel Pentium III processors offer the
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industry’s top server blade performance at very low power levels for
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high-node-density systems,” said Richard Dracott, director of Intel
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Enterprise Platforms marketing. “IT managers need an open design that
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supports standard applications and interoperability with current systems,
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and RLX’s new Intel-based systems deliver that flexibility.”
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“Our goal was creating a ServerBlade with the highest performance possible
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without diminishing the recognized RLX position as leader in server
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density,” explains Bob Van Steenberg, CTO at RLX. “That’s why the
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ServerBlade 800i combines superior performance, low power consumption and
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impressive density.” An RLX System 300ex chassis holds 24 ServerBlade 800i
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units in a single 3U chassis. This density achievement packs 336 independent
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servers into a single 42U rack, delivering 268,800 MHz, over 27 terabytes of
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disk storage, and 366 gigabytes of DDR memory.
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Clustering applications is a growing area for the ServerBlade 800i. “The
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Intel-based RLX ServerBlade 800i provides an outstanding platform for our
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scale-out computing clusters,” says Dr. Wu Feng, team leader of Radiant
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at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “We built an RLX cluster
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and got our code running in less than three hours,
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compared with the several days required by previous cluster efforts. RLX
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saves us eight times the floor space, and the ServerBlade 800i should
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dramatically improve our floating-point performance.” Similar RLX systems
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are delivering results in the bioinformatic and pharmaceutical sectors, such
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as BLAST, created by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and
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is a popular technique for locating specific patterns in huge DNA and
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protein databases.
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ServerBlade 800i pricing begins at $1,449, including 256 MB of DDR RAM and
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one 20 GB hard disk drive. Configurations with up to 1 GB of DDR RAM and up
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to two 20 GB or 40 GB hard disk drives are available. The RLX System 100ex
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chassis holding up to six blades in 1U is $1,999. An RLX 300ex chassis
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holding up to 24 blades in a 3U rack is $3,299. Every RLX server system is
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built to order.
