Egenera Inc., the data center virtualization company, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent No. 7,178,059 to the company for its innovation in N+1 disaster recovery. Entitled "Disaster recovery for processing resources using configurable deployment platform," this patent further confirms Egenera as a leader in verifiable, cost-effective disaster recovery. Since the company's inception in 2000, Egenera has earned numerous patents in virtualization, failover, and power and cooling.
Egenera's disaster recovery technology simplifies and accelerates moving entire clusters of servers, including their storage and networking connections, to a remote site. Leveraging Egenera's Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture, clusters are reinstated within minutes at the new site, without hardware configuration. A single back-up site can adopt the configuration of any number of primary sites on demand. This unique N+1 approach provides complete yet simple disaster recovery at the lowest cost, without the physical and management complexities typical of physical replication approaches.
Farm Bureau-Western Computer Services
"During one of our DR tests with Egenera, we had the application up and running again in three minutes. I've had experiences where even under planned power downs we would build-in two to three weeks to failover complex, legacy systems -- and the actual move would have taken seven hours," said James Crum, manager, Infrastructure Technology Services at Farm Bureau-Western Computer Services, Inc. "With Egenera -- in concert with 3PAR® storage -- we are able to literally push a button to get everything up and running again. The speed that we now have to get customers back online again is amazing."
Cost and Complexity Stymies Many Enterprise DR Plans
Building and maintaining DR capabilities has historically been complicated and expensive to implement -- the direct result of legacy infrastructure not designed for flexibility or responsiveness. A typical DR solution is to replicate all the servers, switches, routers, NICs, HBAs, cabling, storage arrays, firewalls, load balancers, monitors, KVMs, etc. physically from the primary data center to a backup site. In most cases, these resources earmarked for DR sit idle or "cold" waiting for a failover from the primary site to occur. As a result, implementing DR with legacy computing architectures requires twice the physical and management complexity.
Egenera's approach -- anchored by its PAN architecture -- was specifically designed to create pools of compute, storage and network resources that can be dynamically allocated to applications as needed. The PAN virtualizes server and network resources in the same way that a Storage Area Network (SAN) virtualizes storage resources, resulting in the ability to securely share allocate processing resources across applications; dramatically reduce complexity; enhance agility; and lower the cost of capital and operational expenses. Since the Egenera PAN is a "stateless" environment, logical server definitions are automatically replicated between data center sites, enabling recovery of production applications in minutes.
"We understand that designing, implementing or updating a DR strategy is one of the most strategic IT projects any organization undertakes. Replicating rigid, legacy environments across multiple sites only multiplies complexity and cost by at least a factor of two -- all without meeting a single acceptable recovery time objective," said Pete Manca, EVP of engineering and CTO, Egenera. "Egenera's approach to verifiable disaster recovery is anchored in the fact that a new architecture was needed in order to simplify the process, reduce the cost and verify the recovery. Our new patent for N+1 DR is additional proof that our approach is innovative, effective and verifiable."
Customer Case Studies, Company Whitepapers
Customer case studies and company whitepapers focused on Egenera's approach to verifiable DR through data center virtualization are available at http://www.egenera.com/. For more information on Egenera and its solutions, please contact info@egenera.com or (US) 508.858.3600.