Stories about: RLX Technologies

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Hewlett-Packard (HP) Wednesday rolled out software aimed to simplify the management of its BladeSystem blade servers running Linux, said the company.

Oracle gobbles up Siebel (buuurp). Sun swallows StorageTek (slurp). Adobe feasts on Macromedia (brrrap). And let's not forget Sprint and Nextel's $35 billion hookup, eBay's purchase of Skype, the Symantec-Veritas wedding, or scores of other megabuck deals that are roiling today's enterprise market. Yep, tech companies have suddenly come down with a whopping case of the consolidation crazies. But disruption can be minimized by maintaining close contact with your vendor.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is to buy RLX Technologies as a way to provide better systems management for HP blades running Linux, the company announced Monday. The deal is part of HP's strategy to plug holes in its enterprise management product portfolio via acquisition.

As companies in growing numbers consider blade servers to handle critical business workloads, they are looking beyond the power and space savings they can get and are demanding more when it comes to the tools to manage these compact systems.

With $12 million in funding and a consulting chief scientist from Los Alamos whose research field is efficient computing, high-performance networking and bioinformatics, two of Transmeta's co-founders have reinvented the technical workstation, coming up with a completely new kind of box that's actually a "Personal Cluster" or even a "Personal Supercomputer" - a widget that puts 12 nodes in the space of a classic desktop or 96 nodes in a knee-knocking deskside - both configurations playing to the emerging rage for commodity Linux clusters.

The Wyndham San Jose hotel got a taste this week of some of the power management issues that may be facing blade users in the next few years, as the hotel played host to the Server Blade Summit conference. As executives from Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and Sun Microsystems Inc. talked about the growing importance of power management in blade computing, the Wyndam's power supply flickered on and off, taxed to the maximum by demonstration blade systems running in the hotel.

Blade server vendor RLX Technologies last week introduced a set of products to let IT managers simplify management and save money.

Two years after vendors began introducing slimmed down "blade" computers as the next stage in the evolution of the server, these denser, more power-efficient servers have been struggling to meet market expectations and prove that they have what it takes to emerge as an industry standard.

Veritas Software on Monday began following through on efforts to join the utility space, although the storage software giant isn't alone.

The server market has traditionally focused on bigger and faster machines, the Big Iron that runs large corporate networks and databases. But a number of companies, including Sun Microsystems Inc., are changing the way applications are deployed by networking many small, thin computers known as blade servers and by pooling their processing power.