Egenera and HP partner to deliver converged infrastructure

Egenera and HP just announced that Egenera's PAN (Processing Area Network) Manager software is now available on HP BladeSystem c-class servers.

This move allows organizations that use HP's BladeSystem c-class servers to operate in a more mainframe-like environment that should reduce overall costs of operation and IT administrative costs in specific.

What eGenera has to say about this announcement

Egenera Inc., an industry pioneer in open converged infrastructure and unified computing, today announced it will deliver its converged infrastructure PAN Manager Software^® on HP BladeSystem c-class server blades based on Intel processor technology. By integrating Egenera’s most advanced release of PAN Manager with HP’s market-leading server blades based on Intel Xeon multi-core processors and the Virtual Connect FlexFabric module, customers have an industry-leading solution that simplifies data center management. The solution gives customers greater agility and scale for server operations, while reducing complexity, risk and costs. Capitalizing on the advantages of the HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric module, the latest release of PAN Manager will offer a ten-fold increase in throughput for PAN Manager environments.

Egenera’s announcement further demonstrates the company’s commitment to provide heterogeneous management solutions that let enterprises choose hardware vendors when deploying converged infrastructure and unified computing solutions. The company’s PAN Manager Software now supports HP, Fujitsu and Dell platforms, as well as Egenera’s own BladeFrame^® offering.

About Egenera PAN Manager Software

PAN Manager Software (based on Egenera’s Processing Area Network concept) combines the simplification benefits of unified computing with integrated high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) services for physical and virtual servers. The software uses standard servers and Ethernet and creates server, I/O, networking and storage pools that can be easily re-allocated. The result is a business-critical infrastructure with massive hardware and operational efficiencies. With more than 10 years of rock-solid performance, PAN Manager is deployed at over 1,600 sites globally.

Snapshot Analysis

HP is joining the converged infrastructure club with this announcement. It joins  Dell and Fujitsu in selecting Egenera's PAN Manager software. This move makes a great deal of sense for both HP and Egenera.

I've said this before and I'll say it again. IT and facilities folks loved mainframes because everything (processors, memory, storage and networking functions) was tightly coupled and, thus, much easier to manage. Industry standard systems, however, took a different approach, i.e., a box for every function and a different vendor for every box.  While this allowed the environment to grow and develop rapidly, it also created complexity.

Egenera's products prove that it is possible to build a unified computing environment without having to resort to using a single vendor solution that may include lock-ins that an organization may not wish to accept. This will also be seen has a great move by resellers and solutions suppliers who want to build using this technology, but don’t like the terms and conditions offered by other suppliers.

As any administrator would tell you, complexity leads directly to increased costs, greater opportunity for problems to emerge and can be the enemy of smooth operations over the long term. It's clear that with the adoption of a more virtualized software environment, that bring separate functions back together in a single cabinet is well underway as well.

I've pointed this out before too. Egenera was one of the first supplier of industry standard systems that went down the path of converged systems architecture. The company has been offering a very powerful computing solution for a long time. Now HP's systems can join the club.

During the early years, I often suggested that PAN Manager, the software that made the environment appear unified and easy to manage, was much too good for Egenera to keep to itself. I guess that all of the customers, analysts and journalists saying the same thing must have eventually convinced the company that it had to broaden its base. The first partner was Dell then Fujitsu and  now HP. Who is next, IBM?

Organizations that dream of having a more mainframe like environment using industry standard systems would be well advised to learn more about Egenera's PAN Manager and how it works with HP's BladeSystems.