XML Acceleration Moves To New Blades

Colorado Springs, Colo. - Sarvega Inc., the startup using an all-software implementation of XML acceleration, will port its XML Speedway software to the BladeFrame system of Egenera Inc. The deal marks the first expansion of Speedway software in the server blade world outside of IBM, an original partner of Sarvega.

Sarvega has joined the Egenera Accelerate Alliance Program, and Egenera has joined Sarvega's Partner Program, said Girish Juneja, co-founder and senior vice president of product management at Sarvega (Chicago).

Founded in 2001 by a group that included Vern Brownell, a former chief technology officer for Goldman Sachs, Egenera (Marlboro, Mass.) has made inroads in the financial community and Fortune 100 corporations. Juneja said that Egenera's interest in financial extensions to XML was one of the factors that drove Sarvega to Egenera. The two companies expect Speedway to be used in XSLT, a transform standard that uses the XSL spreadsheet format to translate one XML document into another.

Egenera offers an 84-inch chassis, BladeFrame, that can accommodate two control-plane blades, two switch blades and up to 24 processing blades. The current generation of processing blade, or pBlade, offers two-way and four-way symmetric multiprocessing based on Intel Corp.'s Xeon processor.

In July, Egenera promised to offer a two-way pBlade based on the Itanium 2 processor. Juneja said that the Speedway port will include Itanium-based boards, though not in the original release of Egenera XML products.Sarvega is putting more emphasis on the open blade environment, because the replacement of closed Unix-based data centers with open-hardware grids based on Linux and Windows has made IT managers more interested in open ports to accelerators for XML parsing and schema validation. Juneja argued that Sarvega's software-only solution based on Intel binaries is easier to adapt to grid and cluster computing than dedicated ASIC or board-level models.

Sarvega also is preparing a suite of security benchmarks for XML in conjunction with the Independent Testing Services of CMP Media LLC, which will set standards for XML Signatures, XSLT and XML Encryption. CMP Media is the publisher of EE Times.