Egenera Touts Choice In Converged Infrastructure

When it comes to datacenter operations, there is always this debate on converged infrastructure: Should one buy readymade converged infrastructure offered by hardware vendors or use software for convergence. The former option implied vendor lock-in and the latter meant that that the converged infrastructure may be less optimal. Like many other debates in the industry, this one will not end anytime soon. Egenera, the company offering software based converged infrastructure and unified computing solutions for more than 10 years, made a strong statement in favor of using software based approach by announcing that they are partnering with HP to deliver powerful converged infrastructure solution with high availability and DR Capabilities.

BTW, what does Egenera offer?

As the datacenter becomes more and more complex, we need solutions that can simplify the infrastructure and making it easy to manage. Egenera offers a software solution called PAN Manager which takes away the need to dedicate servers for applications by completely abstracting statically assigned servers, I/O and networks into pooled resources that can be rapidly and automatically re-allocated based on business requirements. Egenera PAN Manager solves this problem by reducing the physical hardware and converging the management.

Essentially, with converged infrastructure, CPU allocation, Data I/O, Storage I/O, Network Configurations and Storage Connections are all logically defined and configured through the software. PAN Manager offers a flexible policy driven way to create highly available converged infrastructure offering higher efficiency inside the datacenter at a low TCO. PAN Manager offers a highly intuitive graphical interface which lets point and click configuration along with templates and capabilities for high availability and disaster recovery.

What does Egenera-HP deal offer?

Egenera has signed a deal with HP to offer their PAN Manager on on HP BladeSystem by integrating the software with HP’s server blades and their Virtual Connect FlexFabric module. This lets their customers have a converged infrastructure without being locked into a single hardware vendor. The HP integration offers a ten-fold increase in throughput for PAN Manager software environments. Egenera has already made deals with Dell and Fujitsu and now Egenera customers can use PAN Manager on top of HP, Fujitsu and Dell platforms, offering a software based alternative to pre-integrated converged infrastructure from companies like Cisco, IBM, etc.. It will be interesting to see how the datacenter market plays out in the coming years with push from hardware vendors for their own converged infrastructure solutions and software based offerings from companies like Egenera.