Egenera Inks OEM Deal With Dell

Dell has agreed to resell and ship Egenera‘s Processing Area Network (PAN) Manager I/O virtualization software on its PowerEdge servers by June of this year. Egenera claims PAN is the epitome of what IDC calls “Virtualization 2.0,” the next step beyond simple VMware-style single server virtualization replete with scalability, faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery and resource balancing. Pricing for the software has yet to be released.

Egenera’s PAN Manager supports Citrix Systems Inc.’s Citrix XenServer and VMware Inc.’s virtual machines and the company plans to support Microsoft’s virtualization technology, Hyper-V, when it becomes available later this year, CTO Peter Manca said.

The OEM deal with Dell is obviously not exclusive, meaning PAN could still wind up on IBM and HP gear, although that path seems much harder to follow than sticking with Dell. The computer giant intends to sell the widgetry on PowerEdge servers initially through its Advanced Solutions unit along with infrastructure consulting services.

From the press release:

“Dell is listening to customers and providing solutions that make the virtual data center easier to deploy and manage, regardless of platform,” said Rick Becker, vice president, Dell Software & Solutions. “Dell and Egenera will help customers focus on company growth by delivering excellence in virtualized infrastructure from server performance, storage interoperability to dynamic data center management.”

“The Dell-Egenera relationship was driven by customer need for simple, agile and cost-effective solutions that virtualize and unify data center assets beyond a single server,” said Mike Thompson, president and CEO, Egenera. “We’re driving to provide customers with a powerful, integrated way to manage server, network and storage assets, with lower operational costs, increased resource utilization and uptime.”

[Source: SearchServerVirtualization]