Ive been reading more and more on Blade Technologies:

http://www.rlxtechnologies.com/home.html

It looks amazing and seems to be a sound future here.

Thoughts

Joe

The demand for such high-density systems has been artificially promoted by the common practice of pricing colocation based solely on bandwidth and the number of rack units used. While it is encouraging to try to optimize use of $1000/month racks by maximizing server density, the actual cost of colocation is based as much on power consumption as on space.

If more facilities based their pricing on power use as well as space, I think we would see far fewer 'ultradense' systems, and far more systems designed completely for low power consumption.

This has been discused recentally.

Click Here (http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=18883&highlight=rlx)

The demand for such high-density systems has been artificially promoted by the common practice of pricing colocation based solely on bandwidth and the number of rack units used. While it is encouraging to try to optimize use of $1000/month racks by maximizing server density, the actual cost of colocation is based as much on power consumption as on space.

If more facilities based their pricing on power use as well as space, I think we would see far fewer 'ultradense' systems, and far more systems designed completely for low power consumption.

This is not entirely true. First, RLX servers have a huge power reduction over standard U's. Second, if this market isn't going anywhere or is 'artifical", try telling that to Dell, Compaq, and Sun, all of which are releasing blades soon. Not sure these guys would go into an artifical market.

Originally posted by UmBillyCord
First, RLX servers have a huge power reduction over standard U's.

Using what processors? Blade servers are not inherently low-power; the only reason those particular blades are low-power is that they are using processors originally designed for use in laptops. Compare these to servers built with mobile PIII processors, and they don't have any significant per-processor advantage.

Second, if this market isn't going anywhere or is 'artifical", try telling that to Dell, Compaq, and Sun, all of which are releasing blades soon. Not sure these guys would go into an artifical market.

I'm sure that they will go into any market, artificial or otherwise, if they can make money out of it. ;)

Using what processors?

They use Transmeta Chips.

It is like buying a RAQ. You know the downs, but you live with that. Blades won't be for everyone. However a lot of companies will soon be using them.

These systems will be very successful in the enterprise market. Datacenter space is very expensive, and server use is going up, not down.

I'll eventally replace 10 racks full of 1-4U servers with 4 racks of these, and be able to use the rest of the space for my other datacenter expansion needs that are not easily satisfied with simple rack systems.

-t

Hey.. I'm get my RLX Eval hopefully next week. I'll let everyone know how it is then.

I already did the math. Buy using the blades you pay for 1/3 the hardware costs in space savings alone in one year!! The more you use the more you save. If you fill a 40 U rack you pay for 1/2 the hardware in space savings alone in 1 year!!!

The cool thing is a full chasis of 24 blades only uses 2 to 4 amps at full capacity. 24 1u servers would use 40 amps easy.

When they get the technology down. It will be un stopable!(is that a word?:D )


Chris

Hey.. I'm get my RLX Eval hopefully next week. I'll let everyone know how it is then.

We'll hold you to it.

We are really interested in running Ensim on these (ServerXchange we already have). We are hoping a 1 GB, 800 MHz blade can handle 250 domains.

FutureQuest got their first one a few weeks ago.

General feelings so far:

++ Looks: Very nice. They are sweet looking.

++ Price: Fair. nothing to complain about.

++ Functionality: They work well and support is top notch. We would not use them for community servers however for an economical dedicated server offering they will be more than fine.

Complaints: Security and 4200 RPM harddrives both of which we are in constant discussion with RLX in an effort to solve. Thankfully RLX has been very receptive to these issues.

Overall we like them quite a bit. We are already using the blades internally but it will take some time before we release them for general public usage (testing testing testing)

And that's our 2 second review so far.

4200 RPM harddrives

Holy crap. I knew they were slow, but not that slow.

RLX is ok but as it has been said above, they are not the most powerful. Such as low end chips and drives.

Now http://racemi.com/ has a design that only fits 5 servers in a 1U instead of the really large amount RLX does, but these babies are 1Gigahertz with 1GB of ram. I am more interested in hearing reviews on these than RLX.

These don't have hard drives at all.. You have to boot from NAS.. At least the RLX Blades have Hard Disks.

Originally posted by JeremyL
RLX is ok but as it has been said above, they are not the most powerful. Such as low end chips and drives.

Now http://racemi.com/ has a design that only fits 5 servers in a 1U instead of the really large amount RLX does, but these babies are 1Gigahertz with 1GB of ram. I am more interested in hearing reviews on these than RLX.