Rackable\'s super efficient gear fills the cloud

Tag : Handy Box


With the fresh gear, Rackable is sharing more basics –motherboards and power supplies – across the systems in aneffort to reduce cost and manufacturing complexity.
The XE2004 stands as the new base system. It's a 2U unit, whichuses Rackable's patented half-depth, back-to-back design. So, itmarries a pair of two-socket servers around a single power supply(AC/DC), along with four 3.5-inch disks. This system is shippingnow with Intel's 5100 Series Xeon chips.

The XE2006 is the XE2004's bigger brother, supporting six disksinstead of four. It will ship in the third quarter with Xeons andOpterons available.

By doing a 2U, back-to-back design, Rackable was able to cram inmore disks in its latest systems, while still sticking to the 1Uhalf-depth density. Rackable claims to offer more storage per rackunit than just about anyone else in the market.

And the XE2208 notches things higher once again, combining fourtwo-socket systems and eight disks in a full-sized 2U unit. Thisbox also ships in the third quarter with Xeon 5100 Series chips. Asa point of reference, the server chews through only 160 watts pertwo-way chunk thanks to its use of low voltage processors. It's theXE2008 which will go into Rackable IceCube containers, bringing asingle container up to 2,800 two-socket servers, which is twice asmany as today.

A much beefier 9U box dubbed the ScaleOut Blade ST2000 arrives as ahalf-depth enclosure, packing 12 two-socket servers, 48 3.5-inchdisk and three power supply modules. This tubby mother ships in thethird quarter with low voltage Xeons.
It's somewhat amusing that Rackable decided to launch these newsystems under the "Cloud Computing" umbrella. This is not a case ofa company reinventing itself to jump on the latest marketingbandwagon. No, Rackable was invented with the cloud in mind, andnow it has a much-hyped, handy label for the gear.

The company's products continue to stand out in a marketincreasingly flooded with "cloud" offerings. In general, Rackablecompromises less than the Tier 1 vendors on things such as powerconsumption and storage density because it's catering to serviceproviders and high performance computing types rather than a broadaudience. And even the Tier 1s' cloud specific gear such as IBM'snew iDataPlex system resemble Rackable clones that didn't quite hitthe mark.

One example of Rackable's ingenuity comes via a custom designedpower supply which shows 93 per cent efficiency with AC power and96 per cent efficiency with DC power. That's well above the otherguys' "power efficient" supplies, which often fail to crack the 90per cent barrier.

Beyond all this, Rackable's data center in a container looks likethe best design going at the moment. And that's an accomplishmentworth celebrating these days, since Microsoft has more or lessjustified the entire container concept by basing a new, massivedata center in Chicago around the systems.

The major challenge facing Rackable will be how long it can out dothe big boys. You get the feeling that they'll eventually catch upwith the energy efficient designs now that they're intent oncopying Rackable with full force. This is part of the reason why wethink a software company and not a hardware maker might end up as Rackable's most likelyacquirer.