support for bladeframes

[josef radinger]

Hello,

We are currently evaluating (without the actual hardware, just by
reading whitepapers) a bladeframe system from Fujitsu-Siemens, which
should be a relabeled egenera-system. 

maybe someone had such a system at work. 

my concerns are:
a) does fedora (4,5,...) work on that?

b) el4 seems to be supported, but would i need to have some special
drivers. i dont like those closed-source drivers, as we always have to
wait for vendors to get their supported kernel patched.

c) most of their key-features (fast installation, balancing,
redundancy,...) are already solved by kickstart, our
firewalling-system,... 
currently we install important/heavy-loaded systems twice or triply, and
use round-robin and load-balancing to achieve the same. without fancy
gui, but who cares. the only feature i see is that hardware is better
used, as the load gets spread over more blades, which is not the case
with our standalone boxes right now.

any input would be highly appreciated.

yours
josef