--Leading Investment Bank Adopts Egenera BladeFrame System to Lower TCO, Consolidate Servers and Improve Performance for Business-critical Applications--
Marlboro, Mass.-January 30, 2002- Egenera, Inc., an emerging leader in data center infrastructure, today announced that it has received a significant order for its EgeneraTM BladeFrameTM systems from Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), a leading global investment bank serving institutional, corporate, government and individual clients. The BladeFrame and its Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture represent a new approach to computing by integrating hardware, software, networking and services to consolidate, simplify and virtualize the allocation and management of processing power.
"Today's IT professional is under tremendous pressure to reduce operating costs while ensuring that the data center infrastructure can support business-critical applications. Increasingly, the physical nature of legacy servers has become a hindrance to reliability, flexibility and efforts to lower total cost of ownership," said Vern Brownell, chief executive officer, Egenera, Inc. "Alternatively, the BladeFrame and its PAN architecture are purpose-built to overcome these challenges through server virtualization. We believe that CSFB's decision to deploy the BladeFrame, coupled with the quantifiable benefits they've received, validates Egenera's ability to meet the requirements of enterprise-class data centers."
"Egenera has designed a product with superior industrial engineering," said Frank Fanzilli, Chief Information Officer for CSFB. "The management team knows our business and speaks our language. Across the board, Egenera is a credible organization that has gained our confidence."
Leveraging the interoperability between the BladeFrame and CSFB's implementation of EMC Corporation's Symmetrix® enterprise storage systems and EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF)TM business-continuance software, the BladeFrame installations will meet CSFB's disaster-recovery requirements through implementation across multiple regional data centers.
With a proven record for leveraging technology to improve operating efficiencies and enhance client services, CSFB will initially use the BladeFrame to drive the company's global order-routing architecture, a business-critical application that processes an average of 20 million transactions per day. A number of additional applications are slated for rollout during the year.
According to Steve Yatko, chief technology officer for Securities IT at CSFB, the BladeFrame gives the firm a distinct competitive edge. "Competitive advantage is about agility, about how quickly you can adapt to change," Yatko noted. "Being able to not only meet but anticipate customer expectations-and deliver new products ahead of the competition-is crucial to our success.
"The BladeFrame gives us this flexibility. Provisioning and configuration tasks that require three weeks or more with legacy servers are performed in just minutes on the Egenera system, enabling us to accommodate growth and launch new applications in a timeframe never before possible. Simplifying server deployment also allows our developers to focus on strategic initiatives, which means we can respond more quickly to business opportunities. The BladeFrame helps CSFB adapt to change faster, giving us a powerful advantage in a highly competitive market."
A benefit of the BladeFrame's unique architecture, known as a Processing Area Network or PAN, has been a notable impact on CSFB's total cost of ownership, according to Evan Bauer, chief technology officer for Investment Banking IT at CSFB.
"The price/performance of the BladeFrame is significantly better than other high-end platforms," he said. "Our TCO analysis shows that the Egenera system, once fully configured, delivers better performance at one-fourth the cost of RISC-based SMP machines with their necessary additional external network and storage switches. At a price point comparable to standalone Intel servers, the BladeFrame provides built-in clustering, built-in high availability, remote management and other enterprise-class features. With our first application, we've saved over $900,000 in hardware and software costs alone. As we deploy multiple applications across our business, we expect the BladeFrame to save CSFB literally millions of dollars."
With its emphasis on business automation, CSFB has experienced a steady increase in the number of servers required to host applications and the number of administrators needed to manage these systems.
"With both data center space and qualified personnel expensive and scarce, the answer was server consolidation," explained Bauer. "We evaluated the BladeFrame against traditional solutions, and it made good sense. A CSFB application that would have required 20 of our standard RISC Unix servers can be deployed on just four Egenera Processing Blades. The processing, switching and networking capabilities housed in a single BladeFrame replace five racks of legacy hardware."
"With the BladeFrame's built-in interconnect and high-speed switches, server-to-server communication never leaves the box-which means significant gains in I/O performance and very low latencies," said CSFB order-routing application architect Richard Pike. "We've also documented notably higher transaction-processing rates compared to legacy servers. For example, an Egenera Processing Blade can handle one million expression evaluations per second compared to just 120,000 per second on a RISC Unix platform. For transaction processing at CSFB, the BladeFrame provides the best potential we've seen for availability, scalability and performance."
The BladeFrame is the platform for CSFB's first production pilot on a Linux-based, open source platform.
"Moving to production on an enterprise-quality hardware and software platform delivered by a very experienced engineering team removes a lot of the risk that had kept us from exploiting Lintel price/performance at CSFB," Bauer explained. "The BladeFrame's impressive build quality and completeness of its installation and configuration documentation really drove that home."
The Egenera BladeFrame and its PAN architecture deliver a new approach to computing by consolidating and simplifying the allocation and management of processing capacity. Purpose-built for large enterprises and service providers with mission-critical operations, the patent-pending technology integrates hardware, software, networking and services to resolve major data center pain points from a single platform. Leveraging the Red Hat Linux® operating system, the BladeFrame creates a pool of up to 96 server-class Intel® processors on 24 Egenera Processing BladeTM resources that are deployable entirely through Egenera PAN ManagerTM software. Thus, processing power can be dynamically increased, decreased and reallocated to support new applications or accommodate variable demand on existing applications without purchasing, installing or managing incremental equipment.
The BladeFrame was named Best of Show, network servers and peripherals, at NetWorld+Interop 2001 Atlanta, and a finalist for best server at Comdex Fall 2001.
Press Contacts
Nancy Herzog
Egenera, Inc.
508-858-2605
nherzog@egenera.com
Karen McGuirk
Sterling Hager, Inc.
617-926-6665
karen@sterlinghager.com
Egenera has pioneered a next-generation approach to data center computing by integrating hardware, software, networking and services into simple, yet powerful machines. The Company helps service providers and large enterprises reduce application time-to-market, keep applications online, improve data center management and lower total cost of ownership. Founded in March 2000 and privately held, Egenera couples its breakthrough technology with an innovative service model customized for the data center environment. For more information, visit www.egenera.com, send email to info@egenera.com or call 508-858-2600.
Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) is a leading global investment bank serving institutional, corporate, government and individual clients. CSFB's businesses include securities underwriting, sales and trading, investment banking, private equity, financial advisory services, investment research, venture capital, correspondent brokerage services and asset management. CSFB operates in over 89 locations across more than 37 countries on 6 continents. The Firm is a business unit of the Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group, a leading global financial services company. For more information on Credit Suisse First Boston, please visit http://www.csfb.com.
Egenera, Egenera stylized logos, BladeFrame, BladePlane, Control Blade, PAN Manager, pBlade, Processing Blade and Switch Blade are trademarks of Egenera, Inc. Intel is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Red Hat is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. The information in this document is subject to change without notice.
