OffMyServer running FreeBSD on new Intel Blades

OffMyServer, Inc., a provider of high-end networking servers, recently sponsored development for FreeBSD to support the Intel/IBM Blade Chassis and Blades using Intel's Nacona chipset.

Intel Nacona blade servers provide remote management, easy cabling, reliability, redundancy, and efficiency. They can be easily expanded; there is no minimum number of blades that must be present in any blade chassis. In fact, combined with power, space, and system cost, a blade system filled with SBX82 blades can be much less expensive than 14 similarly configured 1U systems.

"Support for the blades is significant because it helps move FreeBSD into the future of the high performance clustering and high availability computing markets," said OffMyServer Chief Technology Officer, Matt Olander.

"Since the OS inherits its reliability and at least some functionality from the hardware it runs on, the blades , being performance and distributed computing machines by design, allow FreeBSD to gain some of these features intrinsically simply by running on the hardware," said Devon H. O'Dell, FreeBSD Systems Programmer for OffMyServer.

To get FreeBSD to boot on the Intel SBX82 blades, a simple patch was made for the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI). Also a change was made in FreeBSD 5.4 that broke the ethernet driver ( the blades use the Broadcom gigabit ethernet chipsets) for the blades that needed to be reverted, said O'Dell. This was fixed for the FreeBSD 6 branch and was merged into 5-STABLE, so it will be in the next 5.5-RELEASE.

Doug White, a member of the FreeBSD Release Engineering team, worked with OffMyServer to integrate the support for the blades .

Intel donated a high-end blade chassis and a couple of blade servers to the FreeBSD project via Offmyserver. It will be used for general FreeBSD development, said Olander.

"We've setup an entire rack for the FreeBSD project with about 20 servers in it all together," he said.

"Our customers are using these machines for various things," said O'Dell. "A very large-scale free and virtual web hosting company with hundreds of thousands of customers uses the blades because they provide excellent remote management capabilities, the reduced cost of colocation, less space needed for more servers, and the processing power and reliability of the hardware."

Other use cases include bioinformatics (using the blades as computing powerhouses to identify and analyze viruses), medical applications, content delivery systems, and hosting, said O'Dell. "Any application requiring density, remote management, easy cabling, reliability, redundancy, efficiency, or any combination of the above is a candidate for blade servers."

About FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a complete and advanced Unix-like operating system which can be used as a secure and high-performance workstation, network server or firewall. FreeBSD is developed by a team of over 200 developers. Over 12,000 third-party software suites are freely available for quick installation from the FreeBSD Packages Collection.

More information about FreeBSD is available on the web at http://www.FreeBSD.org/.

About OffMyServer, Inc.

OffMyServer, a company nestled in the infamous Golden Triangle of Silicon Valley, provides FreeBSD-based Internet infrastructure grade rackmount servers, security appliances, and managed FreeBSD hosting to a global market. The OffMyServer management team consists of former executives and employees from BSDi and iXsystems.

For information about Offmyserver's Blade products, please visit
http://www.offmyserver.com/cgi-bin/store/blade/blade.html.

OffMyServer running FreeBSD on new Intel Blades

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OffMyServer running FreeBSD on new Intel Blades

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