Posted on: June 21st, 2012 by Martin Flint
The “Stateless Computing” approach used by PAN Manager can certainly help improve high availability and at the same time reduce costs, and complexity. This can be achieved because all the servers personality or “state” is stored inside PAN Managers XML database, and the Operating System and applications associated with that servers “state” are stored on SAN or iSCSI storage. This means that when PAN Manager detects a failure due to a bad power supply, memory DIMM, CPU, etc. we can take that server’s profile or “state” and assign it to a different physical resource. That resource can be a blade in the same chassis or a different physical chassis managed by PAN, potentially a blade from a different vendor in another vendor’s chassis. We do this by monitoring the server’s hardware status using the API’s provided by each hardware vendor.… continue reading
Posted on: June 18th, 2012 by Martin Flint
In this blog I plan on answering some of the questions people often ask me about stateless blades or stateless computing resources. You may not realize it but this is quite a large subject so I’ve broken it down into a series so you won’t fall asleep reading a ridiculously enormous blog. I’ll be answering the following questions.. What exactly are stateless blades? How can stateless blades simplify High Availability? How can stateless blades simplify Disaster Recovery? Can a stateless blade approach prevent hardware vendor lock-in? Can a stateless approach simplify hardware upgrades? Is it true that I can drive up server utilization with stateless blades? Should I care about Stateless blades when running virtualized servers? Is Cisco’s UCS version of stateless blades really that much better that the rest? So are Stateless Blades for you? If there is a specific question that… continue reading
Posted on: June 6th, 2012 by Dana Morris
Featuring Guest speaker Rachel Dines, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc., and Scott Harris, Vice President of Services at Egenera, this webinar presents research and real life data on how organizations are solving their Disaster Recovery problems by leveraging advanced technologies, new services like cloud, and embracing process improvements. Insight and practical DR expertise combine to provide an informative and practical webinar presentation. view now
Posted on: June 4th, 2012 by Pete Manca
With today’s new product announcements, Egenera has taken the next step in its evolution. And it was a bold step! Our most recent announcements of partnerships with NEC and IBM were certainly major announcements, but were really just filling out the already impressive list of hardware partners for PAN Manager that already included HP, Dell, and Fujitsu. Now, with the major new functionality announced today, Egenera has moved beyond platform support and towards our innovative roots. Today we added significant new functionality that changes the way data centers are managed. Let’s look at each new products and major features and what they mean for our customers. PAN Cloud Director Just another cloud management product? Not a chance. With PAN Cloud Director, Egenera delivers the ONLY cloud management product that can manage hybrid clouds of physical and virtual resources. While most cloud products are simply front ends to pools of virtual… continue reading
Posted on: May 22nd, 2012 by Dana Morris
Disaster protection is no longer a luxury, RTOs have only increased. At the same time, budgets have only gotten tighter. Thousands of organizations have already found that Egenera provides a proven solution to protect key IT services, provide fast and consistent recovery and reduce costs by upwards of 40%. This webinar presents the PAN Manager solution, and how it protects and lowers the costs of your virtual environments. view now
Posted on: May 18th, 2012 by Martin Flint
In a recent survey, 100% of the companies surveyed acknowledged that they had suffered data or application loss over the previous year. As Data Centers continue to move into the realm of virtual, it becomes more and more complex to deal with the scope of Disaster Recovery. Further research shows that the majority of Datacenters will never be 100% virtual, so we are left with the prospect of spanning both virtual and bare metal resources in any effective Disaster Recovery solution. Even more complexity is added with different hypervisors introduced into the data center environment. Flat budgets, increasing recovery demands, higher levels of physical and virtual complexity, different hypervisors, an ever increasing list of mission critical applications… cold sites and tape backup simply don’t cut it anymore. The exposure to failure comes at an ever increasing risk and price. Most DR offerings fall far short of a comprehensive solution. Egenera’s PAN… continue reading
Posted on: May 10th, 2012 by Pete Manca
Today we introduced our latest partner for PAN Manager – IBM! This is a great addition to our supported platforms, which now include all of the leading blade manufacturers in the world – HP, Dell, Fujitsu, NEC, and now IBM. Why IBM? From a simple market point of view, adding the #2 by volume vendor in the server market significantly increases our total addressable market. However, it’s not the market size that most intrigued us about IBM – it’s the relationships IBM has with customers. IBM is the foremost technology solutions company in the world, and is trusted to develop a ‘best for’ solution. By adding PAN Manager to the IBM BladeCenter ecosystem, Egenera can not only provide customers with greater diversity and choice but is enabled to deliver a best in class platform for managing and improving the service levels between IT and the business. Customer centricity is also… continue reading
Posted on: April 6th, 2012 by John Humphreys
At first blush, the steady march of virtualization continues. But first looks can be deceiving. Matt Eastwood, Group Vice President and General Manager of IDC’s Enterprise Platform Group, at market researcher IDC examined virtualization and converged infrastructure at the IDC Directions conference this year. According to the IDC research, many IT organizations are reaching the end of consolidation and few of these organizations will virtualize more than 80% of their applications. The research also shows that less than 10% of companies expect to ever have 100% of their applications virtualized. This means that the vast majority of data centers will have a mix of virtual and bare metal applications, which also brings a new level of complexity. To combat this growing complexity, leading organizations are aggressively moving to implement different automation, optimization and operational processes that unify the virtual and physical environments. Egenera understands the benefits of maintaining both physical… continue reading
Posted on: April 5th, 2012 by Dana Morris
This webinar explores how the goals of Converged Infrastructure are achieved with PAN Manager and Fujitsu and how a major U.S. healthcare provider is using the joint solution to improve the quality of service while automating the management of their Citrix XenDesktop environment. view now
Posted on: February 10th, 2012 by John Humphreys
A few weeks ago, Cisco posted a field notice to customers of its UCS server blades, saying that failures on the blade can “cause the component to overheat and emit a short flash which could lead to complete board failure.” Cisco also warned that the defect could affect the other blades in the chassis by disrupting power flow. They informed their customers that they are replacing currently deployed UCS B440 Blade Servers, are making hardware modifications and are launching a hardware replacement program. It stands true that any recall, especially when dealing with expensive hardware, will impact the company’s bottom line. This is further proof that designing reliable hardware is difficult and underscores why high-profile companies such as HP spend billions on development. The Cisco recall also highlights the need for industry standards. Associations like the Open Data Center Alliance are working to bring interoperability and standards to the data… continue reading
