Leading the industry beyond server virtualization, Egenera Inc. announced today that it will make Egenera® PAN Manager™ software available on other vendors' hardware platforms as part of its new software business.  PAN Manager delivers Data Center Virtualization by combining server virtualization with network and storage virtualization to transform IT infrastructure into flexible, scalable assets that can be allocated as needed - resulting in rapid time to market, dynamic scalability and cost-effective high availability. Announcements regarding specific third-party platforms and availability will be made separately.

Egenera will continue to innovate and advance the highly successful Egenera® BladeFrame® product line, featuring high-performance, integrated solutions designed for business and mission critical computing.  The BladeFrame system will continue to be focused on the high end of the application set where the need for performance and availability are most critical.

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.

Integrating PAN Manager with third-party platforms outside of the company's own BladeFrame system will enable customers to leverage the benefits of the industry's most sophisticated and advanced data center virtualization software in a much broader fashion, while increasing Egenera's addressable market and global distribution channels.

"IDC believes that customers are poised to move to 'Virtualization 2.0' where the benefits extend from capital cost reduction to lower operational expenses, improved service levels, and better responsiveness to ever-changing business needs," said John Humphreys, program vice president at IDC.¹

IDC defines Virtualization 2.0 as the next step beyond server virtualization to encompass faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery, resource balancing, and, ultimately, policy-based automation.  From a technology standpoint, Virtualization 2.0 combines server virtualization with network and storage virtualization, and the ability to dynamically align these resources.  Egenera defines this as Data Center Virtualization.¹

Humphreys continued, "Although many in the industry remain focused on server virtualization alone, Egenera has been able to incorporate the technology into its management solution and to combine that solution with network virtualization capabilities that enable customers to bring virtualization to the next level."

"SAVVIS has leveraged Egenera's unique virtualization technology as an integral part of our industry-leading Virtual Utility Services offering for over three years," said Bryan Doerr, CTO of SAVVIS.  "Egenera PAN Manager software provides exceptional value to SAVVIS, and we see great opportunity to increase this value by having this technology available across a broader spectrum of hardware platforms."

Proven in production for more than five years and deployed at hundreds of customer sites worldwide, Egenera PAN Manager software virtualizes compute, storage and networking resources that can be dynamically allocated as business requirements dictate. 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.

"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."

Thompson continued, "While our new software business is extremely important, we remain committed to continued innovation and advancement of our highly successful BladeFrame product line, which continues to offer customers high-end integrated systems for business and mission critical applications."