Egenera Breaks from Blade Server Hardware to Offer Software Solution

Egenera is considered a pioneer in the blade server market, and it’s known for incorporating two of today’s hottest technologies, blade servers and virtualization.

Egenera’s BladeFrame line is a blade server system powered by the company’s Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture. And up until now, if you wanted to use the company’s PAN Manager virtualization management tools, you had to purchase their BladeFrame product line. But now, with a recent announcement, that is about to change. Egenera announced that the company is going to make a future version of the PAN Manager software available to other vendors’ hardware platforms.

For those of you who may have been watching the blade server market for some time now, you might be having a flashback to the old RLX Technologies company who delivered a commercial blade server back in the early part of 2000. Around 2004, under new management, RLX decided to move from the hardware business into the software business only to then get acquired by HP and then have their software consumed or disappear into one of HP’s software product lines.

Unlike RLX, Egenera said that this isn’t the direction they plan on taking the company – they aren’t giving up on their hardware line in favor of a software only solution. Instead, the company said they will continue to innovate and advance the highly successful Egenera BladeFrame product line. Their BladeFrame system will continue to be focused on the high end of the application set where the need for high performance and availability are most critical. And by integrating PAN Manager with other third-party platforms, Egenera can enable customers to leverage the benefits of its sophisticated, time tested, advanced data center virtualization software in a much broader fashion, which will also allow the company to increase their addressable market and global distribution channels.

“Bringing PAN Manager software to non-Egenera hardware platforms is one of our most significant and strategic moves since launching the company seven years ago,” said Mike Thompson, Egenera president and CEO. “PAN Manager is truly at the heart of our value proposition in the data center – giving customers the power to move quickly and without restriction as is required in today’s business environment. Making our proven software available beyond our own hardware makes business sense for Egenera and gives our customers choice in how they implement data center virtualization.”

Egenera PAN Manager software complements widely-deployed server virtualization (hypervisor) solutions by delivering full infrastructure virtualization that provides:

• Simple and seamless provisioning and management for both physical and virtual servers, virtual networks and storage;

• Cost effective high availability through Egenera’s patented N+1 availability technology;

• Verifiable disaster recovery through Egenera’s patented N+1 DR technology;

• Simple right sizing and scalability through dynamic repurposing; and

• Effective chargeback capabilities, logical, secure partitioning, and named pools of resources.

The first phase of virtualization – server virtualization – utilizes hypervisor technology to virtualize one server at a time in order to improve hardware utilization. Egenera’s data center virtualization software goes further by enabling users to create networks of virtual and physical servers, and move individual servers, groups of servers or entire systems from one place to another seamlessly, securely and with verifiable disaster recovery and uptime.

Egenera hasn’t said who will be using PAN Manager on an OEM basis yet, or what the product’s cost will be.