As the name suggests, RackSaver specialises in servers that take up less space than wares from competitors. In general, the company concentrates on large contracts, where a private company or a university is seeking to install hundreds, if not thousands, of servers. "We've got customers with 10,000 nodes (individual processors) or more," Kim said. "Since 2001, we have installed more Linux-based clusters in the oil and gas segment than the tier one manufacturers combined." Like its competitors, the company has developed its own set of tools to help information technology executives manage these massive computer collections. The tools can warn of hardware meltdowns, monitor switches and help administrators shift computing burdens. Additionally, RackSaver has designed its own cooling systems, because heat is a special problem in dense blade servers. The design of the company's blade system will also provide a smooth avenue for the acceptance of both AMD's and RackSaver's technologies. The BladeRack system can simultaneously contain six different chips: Intel's Pentium III, Xeon and Itanium, and AMD's Athlon, Opteron and Athlon64. Thus, by buying RackSaver's blade system, customers can experiment with AMD chips and install them, if need be, for regular use. The racks that will accommodate the Opteron chips "are going to be the same as the ones installed at Pixar," Kim said. Large manufacturers, however, may begin to tout how different types of chips can fit into their racks, Freund said. IBM, for instance, is working with Cisco Systems to fit networking equipment into its rack. The Opteron-compatible products coming in April will include a two-processor 1U rack server, a two-processor 2U rack server with hot-swappable drives, and blade racks that can incorporate 44, 66, 88 or 132 processors. Newisys designed the 1U and 2U servers and designed the blades -- but not the rack -- on the blade systems, according to Kim and Steeg. The designations 1U and 2U refer to the dimensions of the server. Additionally, the company will release a small blade that can house eight Itanium processors or 11 Opteron or Xeon processors. The small blade server will be tuned to work with Oracle and IBM databases and pitched at customers in the financial services market.
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