Blade PC maker ClearCube Technology last week added new features to its suite of management tools for firms running ClearCube blade clients in the datacentre. Control Center lets administrators automate many management tasks, while Grid Center can dynamically allocate staff to blades based on their user profiles.

ClearCube sells blade PC clients that sit in a rack instead of on staff desktops, with a suite of management tools in order to control which users connect to which blades and to provide a backup service for users' data.

The first generation of its hardware offered a direct connection between the blade array and staff desktop consoles, but it has now moved to using Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to carry the Windows desktop display via IP packets across a LAN. This allows for greater flexibility in where users can be hosted.

New in ClearCube Management Suite (CMS) 4.0 is Grid Center, which enables administrators to better manage the connection between staff and the central array of PC blades. Grid Center can assign users to blades, taking account of the processor workload when they log on, the firm said.

"An administrator can assign users to groups based on their profile, and define which blades this group can use," said ClearCube senior technologist, Ken Knotts. The profile can also be based on application-usage history, so a user who runs demanding applications will automatically get connected to a higher-specification blade than other users.

The software allows multiple users to share a single blade. Up to four users may be connected to the same blade if they are only running basic productivity tools, for example. "The idea is that a firm will have a set of PC blades scalable from an entry-level profile up to high-end, to fit the scale of (user) needs," said Knotts. ClearCube blades are available with Pentium 4 or dual Xeon chips and up to 4GB of memory.

Also new is Control Center, which lets administrators call up status information, such as health and chip utilisation statistics, for a blade or group of blades. It also supports scripts to help set up and manage the clients.

"It's like a macro language to help automate IT management processes," Knotts said. Scripts can be created to automatically move a user to another blade in the event of a hardware failure alert, or even to automatically delete MP3 music files if a user downloads them from the internet.

The IT department is too often seen as a cost centre because staff only react to problems, Knotts said. "With the scripting technology, administrators can start being pro-active in order to better help users."