The 1620 brings high-performance Intel® Xeon™ processor capabilities, gigabit ethernet performance, and sophisticated remote management capabilities to a cost-effective platform specifically designed for computational clustering. The 1620 can tackle the most demanding applications with up to 12GB of RAM, dual gigabit ethernet ports, an optional Ultra 320 SCSI subsystem, and sophisticated remote management.

The 1620 incorporates sophisticated management capabilities that allow light-out remote management including remote power cycling, environmental monitoring, and serial console access through ethernet or serial connections. California Digital can also demonstrate sophisticated remote installation and monitoring procedures leveraging these core management capabilities. This allows a customer to manage 1620s located anywhere on the internet from any internet-connected location.

The management capabilities arise through the use of freeIPMI, a set of libraries allowing command-line access to the 1620's built-in IPMI 1.5 capability. The 1620 and California Digital's freeIPMI library have been built to implement the complete IPMI 1.5 specification. Many alleged implementations of IPMI omit important features and hence compromise the resulting feature set. That isn't the case with the 1620 -- the management capabilities have been specifically developed through the freeIPMi software and the included freeIPMI shell permitting extensive utilization of this sophisticated technology from the Linux command line and shell.

The 1620 features a 64-bit PCI-X expansion slot, two drive bays for either IDE or SCSI drives, room for an optional CD-ROM, and a cooling system specifically developed to accommodate the 1620's SE7501WV2 motherboard.

The 1420 provides a cheaper alternative without remote management capabilities.