Egenera Inc., a leader in datacenter virtualization architecture, today launched Egenera vBlade software, an entirely new way to manage both physical servers and virtual machines by providing a single environment for configuring, allocating, repurposing and managing both types of resources. Egenera’s first vBlade implementation utilizes XenEnterprise, a comprehensive virtualization solution from XenSource, Inc., which offers the industry’s first commercial implementation of virtualized Windows and Linux on the Xen hypervisor. Concurrently, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Egenera’s exclusive OEM alliance in EMEA, is announcing vBlade software today at VISIT, its annual customer conference (see related Fujitsu Siemens Computers press release at www.fujitsu-siemens.com).
In related news, XenSource announced today that it has entered into an OEM agreement with Egenera whereby Egenera will integrate XenEnterprise into Egenera PAN Manager software as part of the new vBlade offering. Egenera is a XenSource Strategic Alliance Partner, a designation reserved for global market leaders making strategic investments and commitment to XenSource technology, vision and go-to-market initiatives (see related XenSource press release at www.xensource.com).
With vBlade software, Egenera BladeFrame customers can take advantage of the same levels of high-availability, N+1 failover, disaster recovery, dynamic repurposing and other critical services built into the Egenera architecture for both virtual and physical resources through Egenera PAN Manager software. Whether a customer is consolidating hundreds of servers onto virtual blades or deploying the most mission-critical applications on physical blades, Egenera is the first to eliminate both the management complexity and physical complexity plaguing enterprise datacenters today, by providing a solution built to deliver agility and simplicity.
“Agility is the ability of an organization to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to that change. However, no organization will be agile if its datacenter and infrastructure aren’t,” said Tom Bittman, vice president and Gartner Fellow at Gartner.
XenEnterprise provides the ability to easily move multiple virtual servers onto a single physical machine, and then migrate those virtual servers whenever additional resources are needed. This high-performance, easy-to-implement virtualization platform allows for a radical reduction in the total number of servers needed by an organization, reducing IT costs and enabling operational agility.
“Egenera is a pioneer in using virtualization to simplify the datacenter and help enterprise IT become more efficient and cost effective,” said Simon Crosby, founder and CTO of XenSource. “With the integration of XenEnterprise with PAN Manager, customers will be able to take advantage of even greater levels of efficiency, performance and utilization, while maintaining the overall simplicity of management within their datacenters.”
“Egenera has raised the bar again,” said Pete Manca, Egenera CTO and EVP of engineering. “While the large server vendors are just starting to introduce limited virtualization into their industry-standard servers, Egenera has been delivering a fully-virtualized, open platform since 2001. With vBlade software, we have made another significant advancement in leveraging virtualization technology to reduce datacenter complexity and increase agility.”
Unlike legacy servers, Egenera servers have always been virtual assets that are deployed, managed and repurposed quickly and simply. Rather than tie a specific operating system and application to a physical server, Egenera’s Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture creates pools of compute, storage and network resources that can be easily shared and automatically repurposed based on business priorities and service-level agreements. With the introduction of vBlade software, users can define pools of physical and virtual blades, and deploy Egenera’s virtual servers on either physical or virtual blades in the same exact manner across the entire PAN – including multiple BladeFrame systems – making the provisioning of servers to physical or virtual blades simple. This also provides easy failover, rapid scalability, load balancing and disaster recovery on a larger scale.
“The proliferation of virtual machines during the next decade will drive an explosion of complexity even greater than that caused by distributed computing in the ‘90s,” said Vern Brownell, Egenera founder and chief strategy officer. “Meanwhile, other technologies – such as iSCSI, 10G Ethernet and multi-core processing – are also coming on strong. For IT, incorporating this juggernaut of solutions is a monumental management challenge.”
Brownell continued, “Egenera’s PAN architecture was specifically developed to abstract and encapsulate complex solutions such as virtual machines and eliminate their complexity from users. While other vendors struggle to keep up by adding new technologies on top of unwieldy legacy infrastructures that were never built for virtualization, only Egenera has been able to simplify the management of virtual machines in a way that completely protects customers from the complexities that bog down their operational performance.”