Egenera creates physical & virtual servers transparently

Egenera just announced that it's embedding virtual machine provisioning within its PAN Manager software for free.

PAN Manager is the "secret sauce" Egenera has been using to manage its own hardware for years, and recently OEM'd to Dell as part of their Dell PAN System. The software has always had the ability to provision physical and/or virtual servers with mission-critical levels of availability, including networking, I/O and storage configurations.

Now Egenera has bundled the virtual server provisioning option in at no charge into the core management product. The technology is based on the latest Citrix (Xen) technology.

That means that Egenera's own hardware -- as well as Dell Blades -- not only operates with a "unified computing" architecture (as some would call it!), but that operators have the option to create physical or virtual servers on-the-fly, as conditions require. And, regardless of the type of server (or software workload) the servers are protected with HA and DR, even across remote locations.

For Dell, this gives them a play in the mission-critical computing market, with a way to either embed VMs within their bladed environments, or to support other virtualized environments like VMware or Microsoft -- all with similar five-9's of availability.

Using the system is super simple and elegant. You'll never need to re-cable a server again, and never have to worry about I/O, network configuration or DR configuration. IMHO it will be the infrastructure model the industry will migrate to.