Egenera, NEC and PAN Manager 7.1

Egenera's CEO, Pete Manca, and VP of Marketing, John Humphreys, stopped by to chat about the company's newest partner, NEC, and the newest version of PAN Manager. Egenera was one of the developers of the whole concept of blade computing and continues to offer innovative software and hardware to support scaleable, extensible computing.

PAN Manager was Egenera's companion software for its BladeFrame systems. This software is designed to manage converged infrastructure systems. It's key strengths are the ability to treat all of the servers, I/O devices, networking and storage as a pool of resources that can be dynamically assigned to tasks. Over the years, Egenera has made PAN Manager available on a growing list of products from other hardware suppliers. Recently, NEC joined the ranks of companies that are using PAN Manager as a part of their converged infrastructure systems. Egenera is proud to point out that PAN Manager is currently available on the Egenera BladeFrame, Fujitsu Primergy blade servers, Dell PowerEdge blade servers, HP ProLiant blade servers, and now, NEC's SIGMABLADE severs for the Japanese market.

We then reviewed PAN Manager 7.1. A new feature, runbook replay, was added making it possible for a complex workload to be restarted automatically after a failure. Pete pointed out that it is now possible to get a complex workload back into production in less than 60 minutes. This version of PAN Manager doubles the number of nodes it can support. The number of nodes, of course, depends upon the hardware architecture of the systems.

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I've been following Egenera since the very early 2000s and have always been impressed by the sophistication of the company's management tools for both physical and virtual environments. The company has led the way to making multi-system configurations appear to be a single computing resource. PAN Manager 7.1 extends this capability to both increase scalability and increase levels of availability and reliability.

Early on, I told company executives that the software was too good to keep to themselves. I imagine that many others told them the same thing. The company freed its software and now it is available on systems offered by other partners.

I expect that the company will continue to add new partners and then turn to supporting even larger computing environments made up of more powerful blades and larger number of computing nodes. If your organization is looking at converged architecture systems and is considering options offered by Dell, Egenera, Fujitsu, HP or NEC, it would be worth getting to know Egenera's PAN Manager better.