BladeEngine for PRIMERGY Blade Servers delivers unified network communications for advanced virtualization

Fujitsu Siemens Computers introduces combined 10 Gbit Ethernet and iSCSI SAN Mezzanine card extending virtualization functionality
Adding the BladeEngine, a unified Ethernet and iSCSI network controller to its PRIMERGY Blade Servers, Fujitsu Siemens Computers introduces advanced support for fully-virtualized datacenter environments. PRIMERGY BX600 series Server Blades, designed for the Dynamic Data Center, are systems offering the ServerEngines dual-capability 10 Gbit Ethernet and iSCSI SAN controller qualified for full virtualization operations – such as allocating networking and storage bandwidth to individual virtual machines in VMware and Xen environments.



Fujitsu Siemens Computers has fully-qualified the BladeEngine™ 10Gbit mezzanine card from ServerEngines, which enables network convergence by executing both Ethernet and iSCSI protocols on a single fabric within PRIMERGY BX600 Blade Servers. The high-performance BladeEngine delivers improvements in network throughput and storage performance, reduces host CPU utilization and extends the scalability of BX600 Server Blades by providing full, stateful hardware offload support for TCP/IP and iSCSI protocols.



Unique to PRIMERGY, the BladeEngine card enables any blade to boot any supported OS from the IP-SAN, meaning that individual Server Blades can be both diskless and stateless. In addition, enhanced I/O virtualization capabilities make PRIMERGY BX600 series Server Blades an ideal platform to run today’s high volume, mission critical applications such as Microsoft® Exchange and Microsoft® SQL Server in increasingly-popular fully-virtualized server environments.



“This dual-capability 10Gbit controller is a milestone because it enables multiple Server Blades to share a high-performance 10Gbit Ethernet network fabric with iSCSI for block storage,” says Jens-Peter Seick, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Server Business at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. “PRIMERGY Blade Servers can now deliver state-of-the-art data transfer and backup demanded by mission-critical systems, even within virtual machines.”



Raju Vegesna, Chief Executive Officer at ServerEngines, comments: “Our BladeEngine-based mezzanine card is ideal for supporting environments that require scalable, shared storage and high performance networking needed to meet the requirements of demanding business critical environments.”



Optimized to provide high computing power from a small system footprint, PRIMERGY BX600 series Server Blades from Fujitsu Siemens Computers are high-density DDC workhorse machines, ideally suited for system consolidation, virtualization, and automation. The Intel-powered BX620 S4 and AMD-powered BX630 S2 models offer as dual socket Server Blades up to 32 GB of onboard RAM and capacity for up to 2x 2.5-inch 146 GB SAS hard drives.



PRIMERGY BX600 series servers featuring the BladeEngine can install and boot operating systems including Red Hat and SUSE Linux (including the forthcoming Xen), Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and are VMware ESX 3.5-ready.