After a rather nice fall drive to Egenera's headquarters in Marlboro Mass. (nice, with the exception of Rt 495, which is never nice, yet always a uniquely Massachusetts experience), I spent the day in their labs taking a good look at the new BladeFrame EX and PAN Manager 5.0. Egenera's digs have all the hallmarks of a company growing very fast; crowded hallways, a literally overflowing parking lot, and the ever Egenera’s digs have all the hallmarks of a company growing very fast; crowded hallways, a literally overflowing parking lot, and the ever- present rattle and hum of a serious engineering firm. Egenera’s new BladeFrame EX is the latest installment of the company’s flagship product, representing the efforts of the six-year-old company very well.The BladeFrame EX is relatively difficult to describe. It’s a blade system, but not really. It’s a virtualization platform, but well, not really. Grid computing? Well, not really. It’s the marriage of all three in a sense, with stateless blades that have CPUs and RAM, but no disk, NICs, HBAs, or any other form of connectivity other than a backplane connection, coupled with controllers and switching modules that deliver the missing pieces. All of this is wrapped up in a chassis that looks like a standard server cabinet.The key is the management software, and a connection to a SAN. All together, a single BladeFrame EX represents 24 servers that can be sliced and diced to run any single server instance (called a pServer ) at any given time, with disk delivered by way of the SAN, and all other connections flowing through the backplane. A few clicks can turn any individual blade from a Windows 2003 server into a RedHat EL 4 server. A blade failure results in the server instance running on that blade moving to a spare blade in a matter of a minute or so, no imaging required.Stay tuned for the first official review of Egenera’s BladeFrame EX, once I figure out how to put the full solution into words. Barring that, my preliminary opinion can be distilled into one word: Cool. Technology Industry