New line of scalable appliance servers are designed for ISPs that want to conserve real estate and require a variety of configuration options. Independent hot-swappable server blades are a key feature.

by Wayne Kawamoto [April 10, 2001]

e-Appliance Corporation announced its new SuperScaler product family of high-density servers. The company claims that its servers should improve total cost of ownership (TCO) at ISPs by significantly reducing real estate and by offering industry-leading high-speed connectivity options that maximize I/O throughput.

Also, SuperScaler solutions are designed to offer a wide choice of configuration options to ISPs so they may match their spending needs with their performance and scalability requirements.

SS600
According to e-Appliance, its SuperScaler 600 is the industry's first appliance that offers four self contained, independent, and hot-swappable high-performance servers in a standard 1U high (1.75") 19-inch rack-mountable form factor.

Each of the independent server blades are designed to be hot-swappable and be exchanged or added without interfering with the operation of adjacent server blades. The SS600 chassis can contain up to 4 PIII processors, 8GB memory, 240GB of disk storage, twelve 10/100 Ethernets, and four USB ports.

The design may make the SS600 an ideal solution for ISPs that want to provide individual (but customizable) servers with high scalability to their customers.

The company claims that the SS600 is uniquely customizable. For example, to increase e-mail capacity, add another pre-configured e-mail server and for more cache, slot in a server pre-configured with caching software.

SS1000
For more compute intensive applications, e-Appliance announced its SuperScaler 1000 appliance with 2 independent, dual SMP servers and optional fibre channel connectivity for high-speed computational processing.

The SuperScaler 1000 is designed for high-speed intensive processing applications such as database, rendering, and streaming media. In database environments, the SS1000 is designed to be an Oracle appliance. The SS1000 can also be attached to a storage subsystem as a controller to create a Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution.

The SS1000 includes two fast Ethernet ports per server (4 total per appliance), and optional dual Fibre Channel ports per server (total four FC ports per appliance for high-speed connectivity to external storage subsystems).

SS500
Rounding out the product line is the SuperScaler 500 appliance server that contains one high-performance dual SMP server with optional fibre channel connectivity. This appliance should be compatible with leading software applications and is targeted towards price-sensitive markets. With a dual SMP architecture, this appliance may be ideal for running applications that need to balance processing power with network performance.

Standard features include two high-speed Intel PIII processors, up to four gigabytes of memory, two removable high capacity IDE disk drives, CD-ROM and FDD.

Availability and pricing
The SuperScaler product family will ship in volume in May.

• Prices for the SuperScaler 600 range from an initial configuration of four server blades costing $7,700 to a fully loaded quad server with maximum memory priced around $23,500.
  
  
• The SuperScaler 1000 ranges in price from $5,700 to $23,000 depending on processor speed, memory size, and connectivity options.
  
  
• The SuperScaler 500 ranges in price between $2,600 to $10,800 depending on processor speed, memory size, and connectivity options.

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