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Pitching Blades
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June 13, 2003
By James E. Drews
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RLX Technologies
RLX Technologies' blade line is geared toward the low-end to midrange server line. For companies, say, an ISP, that needs a large number of servers, for Web hosting or network infrastructure (DNS/DHCP) services, RLX has a solution for you.
RLX ServerBlade1200i, RLX System 300ex chassis
The RLX 1200i blade system is similar to that of the HP BL10e line in that it uses the lower-power PIII mobile processor. Unlike the BL10e, however, the RLX 1200i can support two IDE hard drives on each blade, each on its own IDE chain as the master device. Our blades came with a single 40-GB drive, but two 20-GB drives are available. This makes doing RAID 0 or 1 via software possible--no hardware RAID support on the 1200i.
One thing that we missed on the RLX device is access to the console for video, though we were able to do a workaround. The 1200i does perform text-based console redirection over the embedded serial port (also accessible via the management software). Even the BIOS post and boot process can be viewed over the serial connection. For blades running Linux, this isn't a big deal because the serial connection can be used to connect to the Linux text console and log in. For Windows, RLX provides a text-based terminal connection and a number of command-line utilities for managing a Windows blade. The OS install can be done via a scripted install--no GUI console is needed. Between this and accessing the Windows blade with a terminal services connection, we could do everything we needed to on the Windows blade.
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All RLX systems are managed via a single management blade (purchased separately). The good news is that one management blade can manage an entire rack of blade units. Each blade unit has three 10/100 network adapters; one is used for management, two are for general use--RLX labels them as the "private" and "public" network links. Because the RLX systems can have can as many as 167 1200i blades per rack, the company needed an easy way to uniquely identify each blade. On the management network, each node is assigned a unique IP address based on the rack number, chassis number and position in the chassis. For example, when we wanted to manage the blade in Slot 5 in chassis No. 4 in rack No. 0, its IP address was 10.0.4.5.
We set the chassis and rack numbers via a DIP switch at the front of the chassis. Administrators need to get very intimate with this IP number scheme because management is done via a Web browser to the management blade.
The management software also sets the machine name based on its location in the chassis. So a Windows blade might take on the computer name of RLX-0-4-5. This renaming feature of the management software can be
disabled so the computer name can be set by the administrator.
Managing the RLX system was easy. The Web interface provided a graphical representation of the system that let us drill down to each blade. From the image we could see which LEDs were active on the systems and their states. The Web interface provided a wealth of detailed information, including current voltage levels, temperatures and vital stats on the hardware, OS and software on the blade.
Unique to the RLX management software is its ability to produce trend graphs of various components. Off by default, we could turn on trend graphs to watch items such as critical temperatures, Ethernet traffic, processor utilization and disk utilization. It was easy to view all the same graphs (for example, the critical temperatures) for all blades on a single Web page, making comparison a breeze.
The RLX management software also made it easy to "provision" the OS out to blades. Like the HP RDP software, the OS can use a scripted, unattended install of the Linux or Windows software. Once a blade was configured, the image could be captured for faster redeployment. It was also very easy to customize the images; for example, it took just a few mouse clicks in the Web interface to change the Red Hat Linux 8.0 install to use the ext3 file system instead of the ext2 file system.
RLX System 300ex. RLX Technologies, (866) 759-9866, (281) 863-2100. www.rlx.com
James E. Drews is a network administrator for the CAE Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Write to him at jdrews@nwc.com.
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