With the entire circus ring going on right now over the Blackberry Patent fight, perhaps patents do play an important part in a software company's arsenal.

Enter another patent, this time from Egenera:

Marlboro, Mass.—January 24, 2006—Egenera Inc., a leader in utility computing, today announced that it has been granted a patent for server failover technology by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Egenera has received U.S. patent number 6,971,044 for software that enables high availability of Egenera servers in a virtualized environment. This technology has been a key contributor to the Egenera^® BladeFrame^® system's value proposition since the product was launched in 2001.

Egenera's failover approach offers customers quantifiable benefits over traditional schemes, which generally require a one-to-one ratio of production to backup machines. By enabling primary-to-failover ratios as high as 23 to one, the Egenera BladeFrame system consolidates servers, lowers datacenter costs, increases utilization and provides unprecedented flexibility in the allocation of processing resources.

"This patent is a testament to the talent, passion and expertise of Egenera's development team," said Scott Geng, vice president of software engineering, Egenera. "Our Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture is solving the most difficult IT challenges for the world's most sophisticated datacenters—and enabling us to compete successfully against the industry giants. Today's patent acknowledges the uniqueness of our technology and Egenera's place as a thought leader."

Full text and images of Egenera patent U.S. 6,971,044 are available at www.uspto.gov by conducting a patent number search under issued patents.