Egenera Makes the Leap to Cloud Management
June 8, 2012
The way blade pioneer Egenera remembers things it invented converged infrastructure before it had to abandon its x86 BladeFrame servers, switches and storage for software based on its trusty Processor Area Network (PAN) Manager.
It is now making the obligatory move from other people’s virtualized blade servers to the private cloud still focused on blades.
Egenera has yet to make the great leap to rack servers. Blades, according to CEO Peter Manca, are more uniform and – although racks dominate – blades are faster growing.
While the company works out what to do about racks, its new Pan Cloud Director offers a self-service portal that handles both physical and virtual environments, taking care of all those applications that don’t like to be virtualized and sidestepping lock-in issues…
It says no other cloud lifecycle automation product can consume both physical and virtual resources, making it easier for the enterprise and service providers to manage and provision cloud services by matching configurations with resources that best suit application requirements and end-user budgets.
Its interface can be used to design, track and bill for services. Using a role-based structure, Egenera says PAN Cloud Director can configure all aspects of a service, including pricing, margin, SLAs and capacity. It supports all the major hypervisors as well as the consumption of native servers.
Naturally PAN Cloud Director is fully integrated with PAN Manager for high availability and disaster recovery.
Egenera is aiming the widgetry at data center administrators who have to provide easily accessed enterprise-class clouds services.
There’s also PAN Domain Manager, which can handle converged infrastructures with a practically unlimited number of heterogeneous blades.
Nobody else can do that either and that includes failover and full disaster recovery between blades from different server OEMs.
PAN Domain Manager currently extends PAN Manager support to 256 servers with 20Gb fabric throughput to each blade and an architecture that will scaling beyond this point in the future.
Its advanced storage management feature simplifies storage resource allocation through integration with industry and storage vendor technologies.
Egenera is also adding new many-to-one disaster recovery functionality and plug-in integration with VMware vCenter Orchestrator to its flagship PAN Manager software. That should make it more efficient and cost-effective to automate, manage and protect IT infrastructures. The plug-in enables access to PAN environments from VMware vDirector and vCloud.
Egenera has built up a base of 500 customers for PAN and saw 400% year-over-year growth in 2011. In Q1 it was up 100%, Manca said. Its widgetry, which now comes in four SKUs, sells for $3,000-$4,000 per blade.