John Schmitz

With the third iteration of Control Tower, users will find new features for scheduling the deployment of applications across blade servers and tools for tracking and predicting a company's server usage, said John Schmitz, product marketing manager at RLX.

Along with Control Tower 3, RLX will begin offering customers various software packages for creating and maintaining clusters of servers linked to each other.RLX has partnered with Platform Computing Inc. and MPI Software Technology Inc. to create clustering software that allows an administrator to divide up different applications across clusters and set limits on how much processing power or storage capacity different groups of cluster users can access, Schmitz said.

RLX was one of the first companies to offer blade products, trimmed-down servers that can be packed tightly into a rack-mounted unit.The company competes against Hewlett-Packard Co., NEC Corp. and Egenera Inc.Other server makers, such as Dell Computer Corp. and IBM Corp., also are starting to bring out blade products.

The software improvements should help RLX, based in The Woodlands, Texas, to compete against bigger rivals, said one analyst.

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Current RLX customers can upgrade to the new software at no cost via a download from RLX's Web site, Schmitz said.

To help manage clusters of servers running the Linux operating system, RLX has tied some clustering tools into its Control Tower software.RLX has teamed with its partners to provide tools for loading software onto large groups of servers and then managing those applications.These management features are available directly from the Control Tower GUI (graphical user interface).

RLX has tapped new business in the clustering segment for its servers, which were once targeted primarily at Web hosting companies.Last month, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory unveiled a 240-processor Beowulf cluster dubbed Green Destiny.

The software load has some extra drivers in the kernel to handle the blade's management features and on-board watchdog timer, said John Schmitz, manager of product marketing, and the drivers are available under the GPL.