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Egenera

Egenera Signs Reseller Agreement With HP Solutions Provider

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Egenera, a provider of open converged infrastructure software for data center management, announced that the company has entered into a reseller agreement with HPM Networks, a provider of enterprise IT solutions and professional services with specialized virtualization and networking practices.

HPM is an HP Preferred Partner and one of HP’s largest solution providers.

The company has a significant presence in northern California and other west coast business centers. Both Egenera and HPM Networks are members of HP AllianceONE, a comprehensive partner program focused on HP’s Converged Infrastructure strategy of providing a shared services model to deliver secure, best-in-class applications.

With more than 20 years of experience in virtualization and IT architecture, HPM’s practice excels in communicating and delivering technical and strategic solutions at all organizational levels. Core competencies include data center consolidation, business continuity, desktop and server virtualization, data protection and cloud computing.

Egenera Appoints John Humphreys VP of Marketing

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Egenera, provider of open converged infrastructure software for data center management, has appointed John Humphreys vice president of marketing.

Humphreys most recently was senior director, Data Center and Cloud Marketing at Citrix Systems. There he led the revitalization of the XenServer virtualization platform and had responsibility for developing marketing strategy, defining packaging and pricing, leading program execution, driving customer engagements and pre-sales activity, and acting as a primary spokesperson.

Prior to Citrix, Humphreys was vice president of the virtualization practice at IDC, a global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets.

Humphreys will report to Egenera’s president and CEO, Pete Manca.

Egenera was founded in Massachusetts in 2000 and pioneered the blade server and converged infrastructure markets.

Its flagship product, Egenera PAN Manager Software, makes data centers more agile and reliable while reducing capital expenditures and operating costs.

Egenera Introduces PAN Manager 5.2

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Egenera today announced its next generation software solution for unifying virtual and physical infrastructure management, PAN Manager 5.2.

New features including open APIs enable customers and third parties to integrate PAN Manager commands and functions into their own software suites. By logically abstracting and representing all types of computing assets, both physical and virtual, PAN Manager simplifies the data center environment while ensuring high availability and full disaster recovery.

PAN Manager’s reliable virtualized architecture is based on industry standards and supports popular hypervisors, SANs and server platforms. PAN Manager minimizes data center complexity, and reduces operational and capital expenditures by up to 70 percent.

The major innovations in the latest release of PAN Manager software focus on simplifying manageability through an increasingly granular level of management for both virtual and physical resources. The many major new and enhanced features in PAN Manager software, release 5.2 include:

  • Open APIs enabling customers or third parties to integrate PAN Manager commands and functions into their own software suites;
  • Linux 2.6 kernel compatibility to run PAN Controllers for enhanced performance;
  • Embedded Citrix 4.1 technology enabling Live Migration, support for Red Hat 64-bit operating systems  and  dynamic memory allocation;
  • Support for vLAN technology enabling superior flexibility in designing computing environments within the processing area network – the PAN; and
  • Support for WinPE 2.1 enabling customers to utilize industry standard tools to manage their Microsoft operating system deployments and provisioning.

PAN Manager software by Egenera, release 5.2, is available immediately.

Virtualization Journal Interview With Christine Crandell, Executive VP and Chief Marketing Officer Egenera

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Jeremy Geelan over at Virtualization Journal penned an interview held with Christine Crandell, Executive VP and Chief Marketing Officer for Egenera, offering a fairly interesting read. Previous coverage about Egenera can be found here.

Excerpt:

Virtualization Journal: How does Egenera see the future of the data center? How much of a role will the cloud play in Enterprise IT, for example?

Christine: I see data centers rapidly evolving into reliable dynamic data centers. So what do we mean? At Egenera, we’ve adopted the Burton Group’s definition, which says “The dynamic data center is born from the orchestration of virtualized IT systems and resources.”

A reliable dynamic data center is the next step after virtualization – that’s because virtualization is the essential foundation. Without it, companies cannot achieve the agility, flexibility, and reliability needed to evolve into a reliable dynamic data center. Let’s look at what the data center of the future will be – it won’t be homogeneous – rather it will be highly heterogeneous with components like computing, I/O, and storage stitched together through intelligent fabrics. A holistic infrastructure management system will manage all assets – physical and virtual – including those internally owned and externally service-provided (cloud), all through a centralized console.

Server virtualization is mainstream with almost 70% of companies use x86 virtualization and many are looking at their RISC and mainframe systems for additional opportunities. The benefits of virtualization go well beyond consolidation. Cost reduction is often the starting point, but the benefits really extend well beyond TCO. Virtualization can help you speed development cycles and new resources faster. Companies that have been using server virtualization for 2+ years (that’s about 50% of companies) have realized that virtualization – in its many forms – positively impacts quality of service and their ability to meet SLAs. Automated provisioning, high availability, and disaster recovery are easier and cheaper to implement.

The next evolutionary stage is to address application workload consolidation as a critical enabler of speed, efficiency, and optimization. They enable dynamic allocation and balancing of computing resources based on business policy. Other critical components include unified fabrics, standardized management interfaces, an orchestration engine, and IT governance.

Egenera Ships PAN vmBuilder Software 2.1

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Egenera today announced the general availability of PAN vmBuilder, version 2.1. PAN vmBuilder software seamlessly integrates Citrix XenServer virtual machine management technology, allowing administrators to fully manage virtual and physical server environments unencumbered by the complexities of individual management tools.

Integrated seamlessly into PAN Manager software by Egenera, PAN vmBuilder allows customers to easily allocate both a full or a portion of a server based on the needs of the application or service. This approach completely eliminates the complexity of managing virtual machines and physical servers with disparate tools — freeing up IT staff for other projects.

PAN vmBuilder software by Egenera is available immediately and is offered as an add-on to PAN Manager software by Egenera, which is available across multiple hardware platforms.

Egenera To Offer A Technology Preview Of Its New Capacity-on-Demand Solution at VMworld 2008

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Egenera today announced an upcoming technology preview of its capacity-on-demand solution developed jointly with VMware. Recently, Egenera had already picked VMware’s virtualization technology to power its BladeFrame Systems.

Set to be unveiled for the first time on the show floor at VMworld, the new joint capacity-on-demand solution will provide VMware VirtualCenter users access to PAN Manager by Egenera processing resources directly through VMware VirtualCenter. With capacity-on-demand, customers benefit from the automatic deployment of ESX hosts onto “bare metal” in response to overutilization that can adversely affect virtual machine performance.

With Egenera’s capacity-on-demand solution, new ESX hosts are automatically registered to VirtualCenter as part of the resource pool, while underutilized ESX hosts can be automatically powered off to reduce energy consumption. In addition, VMware features such as Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) and High Availability (HA) will rebalance virtual machine workloads within the changed environment.

Egenera

[Source: VMblog]