Egenera

Egenera, Inc. is a multinational virtualization technology company with corporate headquarters in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Egenera designs, manufactures, and sells blade servers and virtualization management software, and offers consulting and training services related to its products and technologies. Egenera is a privately held company with over 350 employees. [cite web|url=http://www.egenera.com/pdf/presskit/presskit_overview_2_20_08.pdf|title=Egenera Corporate Overview|publisher=Egenera|date=February 20, 2008|accessdate=2008-09-18] Founded in March 2000, the company was named by Network World as one of the top 10 startups to watch in 2002 [cite web|url=http://www.networkworld.com/nw200/2002/egenera.html|title=10 Start-ups to watch|publisher=Network World|date=February 29, 2002|accessdate=2008-09-17] and was a winner in the annual "Red Herring 100 North America" award given by Red Herring magazine in 2006. [cite web|url=http://www.egenera.com/pr_05222006/news-events-press-releases.htm|title=Egenera Named to Red Herring 100|publisher=Egenera|date=May 22, 2006|accessdate=2008-09-17]

Egenera maintains overseas headquarters in the United Kingdom, Japan and Hong Kong.

History

Egenera was founded by Vern Brownell in March 2000. Prior to Egenera, he spent 11 years as chief technology officer for the financial firm Goldman Sachs Group in New York. [cite web|url=http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci1083942,00.html|title=Q&A: Vern Brownell, founder and CTO of Egenera|publisher=SearchDataCenter.com|date=April 28, 2005|accessdate=2008-09-16] Under Mr. Brownell's leadership, Egenera pioneered the Processing Area Network (PAN) which is designed to virtualize and interconnect computing, storage and network resources, creating shared pools that can be centrally managed. Mr. Brownell conceived if the idea for PAN based on his experiences with growing data center complexity at Goldman Sachs. [cite web|url=http://www.virtual-strategy.com/Migration/Egenera-Blades-Virtualization-and-Ease-of-Use.html|title=Egenera: Blades, Virtualization and Ease of Use|publisher=Virtual Strategy Magazine|date=May 4, 2005|accessdate=2008-09-18]

The company launched its first product, the Egenera BladeFrame, in October, 2001. BladeFrame is a combination of bladed servers, firmware and management software. In October, 2006, Egenera announced its plan to create a separate line of business in order to make its virtualization management software, called PAN Manager, available under OEM agreement to other server vendors. [cite web|url=http://www.serverwatch.com/news/print.php/3708681|title=Egenera to Carve Out Space in Software Market|publisher=ServerWatch|date=November 1, 2007|accessdate=2008-09-17]

Egenera has received numerous patents for its technology, including the Processing Area Network, N+1 disaster recovery and virtualized server failover technology. [cite web|url=http://www.egenera.com/pdf/presskit/presskit_milestones.pdf|title=Egenera Milestones|publisher=Egenera|date=June 28, 2008|accessdate=2008-09-17]

Technology and Products

Bladeframe

BladeFrame is a hardware product that combines bladed servers together with storage and network virtualization technology in a single package. A BladeFrame consists of a chassis, backplane, specialty blades, and multiple bladed servers.

Each server, called a "pBlade", contains one or more Intel or AMD processors. pBlades are considered stateless because they are composed only of processors and memory, and do not contain disk drives, direct interfaces to external devices, or other elements that associate the server with a specific identity.

Specialty blades include a Switch Blade (sBlade) that implements networking protocols among the pBlades and a Control Blade (cBlade) that manages the BladeFrame and connects the BladeFrame to external storage and data networks. Communication among the blades takes place over a redundant, high-performance backplane fabric with up to 10 Gigabits-per-second throughput. All system and application software is loaded onto the server blades from an attached storage area network (SAN).

The BladeFrame EX supports up to 24 server blades per chassis and the BladeFrame ES supports up to six blades per chassis. [cite web|url=http://www.egenera.com/products-bladeframe-es.htm|title=Egenera BladeFrame ES|publisher=Egenera|date=January 15, 2006|accessdate=2008-09-17] [cite web|url=http://www.egenera.com/products-bladeframe-ex.htm|title=Egenera BladeFrame EX|publisher=Egenera|date=January 15, 2006|accessdate=2008-09-17]

PAN Manager

PAN Manager is Egenera's management software for aggregating pools of compute, storage and network resources into a Processing Area Network (PAN). An XML-based specification, called an "abstract server definition", specifies a portable definition of system and application software along with associated PAN resource components such as network and storage addresses. The server definition capability allows IT administrators using PAN Manager to assign applications to any physical server or virtual server within the PAN for purposes of server provisioning, application availability and disaster recovery.

PAN Manager integrates XenEnterprise hypervisor software from XenSource into a service called PAN vmBuilder (formerly vBlade). [cite web|url=http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/2006/11/egenera_xensour.html|title=Egenera, XenSource and vBlade Software|publisher=Infoworld|date=November 28, 2006|accessdate=2008-09-17] vmBuilder provides the capability to automatically install and configure a hypervisor instance on any server within the PAN.

PAN Manager's high-level capabilities include:
* Server provisioning and management
* N+1 High Availability with automatic server failover
* N+1 Disaster Recovery
* Resource logging/chargeback
* Security services

PAN Manager is independent of server form factor and works with Egenera BladeFrame and servers from Egenera's OEM partners.

Management

Egenera's senior management is:

* Vern Brownell, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer
* Mike Thompson, President and Chief Executive Officer
* Peter Manca, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering
* Don Peck, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer
* Christine Crandell, Executive Vice President of Global Marketing and Chief Marketing Officer
* Al Lanzetta, Executive Vice President of Operations and Worldwide Services
* Nick Cheetham, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales
* Subo Guha, Senior Vice President of Business Development

Industries Served

Egenera primarily serves the IT markets for financial services, banking, service providers, telecommunications and government. [cite web|url=http://www.egenera.com/pdf/presskit/presskit_factsheet_2_20_08.pdf|title=Egenera Fact Sheet|publisher=Egenera|date=February 20, 2006|accessdate=2008-09-17]

OEM Partners

As of 2008, Egenera has signed OEM agreements with the following vendors:
* Dell [cite web|url=http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/pressoffice/en/2008/2008_03_25_rr_002?c=us&l=en&s=corp|title=Dell and Egenera Partnering to Simplify Data Center Management|publisher=Dell|date=March 25, 2008|accessdate=2008-09-17]
* Fujitsu Siemens Computers [cite web|url=http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com/ps2/press/read/news_details.aspx?id=2751|title=Premier platform for dynamic SOI now shipping with PRIMERGY servers|publisher=Fujitsu Siemens Computers|date=May 7, 2008|accessdate=2008-09-17]

See also

* Virtualization
* x86 virtualization
* Blade Server

References

External links

* [http://www.egenera.com Egenera Home Page]
* [http://blog.egenera.com Egenera Blog Home Page]
* [http://www.xen.org Xen.org project site]
* [http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid39_gci1171411,00.html CIO Primer: Virtualization Basics]