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The power of PAN Manager® software by Egenera® starts with the concept of a Processing Area Network (PAN). Egenera's PAN architecture delivers unparalleled data center efficiency and reliability through the following technologies:
- PAN Foundation Services
- Traditionally, servers, I/O and network are statically configured and cumbersome to change. The PAN architecture defines a set of PAN foundation services, which aggregate and abstract industry-standard x86 servers, I/O, SAN storage and data networks into agile resource pools, enabling those resources to be rapidly and automatically re-allocated based upon business requirements. >>Read more.
- Application Mobility
- The PAN architecture then builds on the PAN foundation services to deliver unparalleled application mobility. Using, PAN’s automated provisioning capabilities, application mobility lets you move applications among servers on demand, in response to workload requirements, time-of-day scheduling, system outages or changes in application resource utilization. >>Read more.
- PAN Management Services
- The combination of PAN foundation services plus application mobility provides a powerful platform for the PAN management services. These integrated services—including rapid provisioning, unified management for virtual and physical resources, disaster recovery and high availability—are simple to use and reliable in response to the dynamic requirements of today’s data center environments. >>Read more.
At the core of the PAN system are three PAN foundation services, which use logical associations to replace the static bindings among servers, resources and software.
Stateless environment
All the servers in a PAN system are stateless and anonymous, meaning that no server-specific or application-specific information is maintained locally. Instead, firmware, operating system and application images reside on the SAN.
Intelligent fabric
The intelligent fabric is a fully-redundant, intra-system network that transmits internal and external disk and network traffic throughout the PAN system. The fabric provides the high-performance, secure -communication path that is necessary for creating shared processing pools and sharing those resources among the servers within a PAN system.
PAN systems meet each application's I/O bandwidth requirements using quality-of-service guarantees. The secure fabric also prevents intrusions, both from within the processing network and externally from remote locations.
I/O virtualization
I/O virtualization is an essential element in enabling application mobility. It uses an intelligent fabric to provide servers with logical access to shared, redundant Network Interface Cards, Host Bus Adapters, and other devices. By abstracting these physical interfaces, applications can move to any server within the PAN system while retaining access to external resources. In addition, I/O virtualization significantly reduces the number of interface devices required for data center operations.
Egenera's I/O virtualization supports several virtual device categories, including Ethernet switches, disk and file systems, tape systems, CDROMs, and console devices. In addition, all virtual devices are automatically multi-path redundant.
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Application mobility is made possible using a logical server definition, another of the fundamental building blocks of the PAN architecture powering PAN Manager software. The server definition describes an application's CPU and memory requirements, software images, hardware and network addresses, Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) and additional peripherals.
Once created, the server definition can be quickly instantiated on any available physical or virtual server within the PAN system. Because the underlying PAN foundation services eliminate all static resource bindings, the service definition enables an application service to retain logical access to all of its resources, regardless of where it runs, and become truly mobile.
By taking an integrated approach to defining and instantiating logical servers, the PAN architecture lets you quickly right-size application services to available processing resources, without the need to configure hardware, install software or overprovision servers. And, with the addition of automated PAN management services, applications remain available even in the event of a hardware failure, software exception or data center outage.
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By leveraging the PAN foundation services and application mobility, PAN management services provide the integrated infrastructure management and orchestration capabilities that keep heterogeneous data centers productive and responsive. PAN management services eliminate the physical and operational barriers to achieving unified and cost-effective server provisioning, server repurposing and automated management. In addition, PAN management services are designed to offer the same operational services, whether managing physical servers, virtual servers or a combination of the two.
For more information about individual PAN management services, see our description of PAN Manager software .
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