PRESS RELEASE For immediate release – 6/19/2014
Contact: support@buildablade.com
A new do-it-yourself blade server system based on the Mini-ITX form factor.
New unique chassis design turns off-the-shelf standard components into blade server systems rivaling high-end proprietary designs, low power consumption and offers exceptional ROI due to the reusable nature of the design.
ITWorks, founded in 1987 and based in Chico, California, announced today that it is now shipping a new design of the Build-a-Blade BB-ITX96 blade computing system for the Mini-ITX form factor. The design is the result of over a year of development and testing and offers up to 9 blades in a 6U rack space.
The Build-a-Blade is a system that is the first of its kind. The BB-ITX96 is a flexible blade chassis system designed around inexpensive and widely available industry standard Mini-ITX components offering a low power alternative (25 watts per blade or less used with Atom processors) to expensive and proprietary commercial blade systems. It can also operate in higher power environments for Intel i7 and Xeon E3/E5 based servers and can handle up to 250 watts per blade. It offers either fixed mounting of a single 3.5” SATA drive, or up to six 2.5” SATA drives on the standard blade tray, or up to four 2.5” SATA drives on the optional hot-swap blade tray.
Unlike proprietary blade systems, the Build-a-Blade system has reusable blade trays, and well as a reusable chassis. When your washer or dryer at home needs replacement, do you throw away your house to replace appliances inside? Of course not. The Build-a-Blade chassis stays in place, you simply upgrade the “appliances” (blades) inside with the latest off-the-shelf technology. This not only improves your return on investment (ROI) but also makes the product greener.
The Build-a-Blade design offers long term ROI, far exceeding traditional blade systems and operates on either AC or DC power, making it suitable for remote or green low power applications. It features architecture that allows you to mix blade hardware configurations in a single chassis and is a scalable solution that can support small business needs, specialized OEM applications, digital signage clusters, media rooms, and server/rendering/computing/cloud farms.
For small business, it provides a way to consolidate the many different PC’s that might act as small office bookkeeping, point of sale, and mail, and document servers into one manageable single rack unit. It offers easy acccess for the blades and for maintenance, such as the fan filter.
The BB-ITX96 offers a unique solution for cooling and power consumption problems that plague server rooms, and puts the power supply system outside of the main chassis, mounted to the rear of the rack, where it does not add to the heat inside the chassis. This method also has three distinct advantages; decentralizing the power supply system so no single point of failure exists, allowing power supplies to be swapped easily in case of failure, and removing heat from the main chassis near computing components.
ITWorks has long been a provider of broadcast TV display systems for use in the most demanding environment ever – live television news and weather – where mistakes or problems aren’t tolerated on-air. Much of the design philosophy we put into our broadcast display systems and weather presentation content has gone into the Build-a-Blade design, in fact we use these systems for our own weather graphics rendering farm.
Build-a-Blade is ROHS compliant, and supports standard as well as Energy Star rated motherboards for low power use. It can operate on 120/240VAC power mains or DC 12 volt power.
Priced at $989.00 for the 6U starter kit, it is very affordable.
Spec sheet is available here: http://www.buildablade.com/documents/BB-ITX96_flyer_V2.pdf
For more information see www.buildablade.com or contact:
Stuart Schaffert support “at” buildablade dot com
Build-a-Blade
c/o ITWorks
3008 Cohasset Road
Chico, CA 95973
Tel: 530-899-8434
Fax: 530-899-3333
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This press release is available in PDF form here: Build-a-Blade_press_release_V2
Build-a-Blade Support 