Egenera PAN Manager Builds Clouds On Heterogeneous Server Infrastructures

Egenera, a developer of software for managing and automating heterogeneous server environments in converged infrastructure environments, is taking its high availability and disaster recovery capabilities to the cloud with this week's introduction of its new PAN Cloud Director.

The Boxborough, Mass.-based company also introduced PAN Domain Manager, an application it said will make it easier to build converged infrastructures using heterogeneous server environments.

The new applications are integrated with Egenera's PAN Manager software, which automates the provisioning, management and protection of heterogeneous IT infrastructures. PAN Manager works by abstracting the IT infrastructure to create manageable resource pools of servers, I/O, networking and storage.

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PAN Manager assigns a profile to individual resources from these pools containing the application configuration and service level requirements. It actively monitors and automatically manages the infrastructure to meet customers' capacity, availability and response time requirements.

PAN Manager creates logical servers that can be "thrown" anywhere, including on blade servers from Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, NEC, Dell and, as of last month, IBM, said Dan Busby, Egenera's vice president of product management.

"PAN Manager simplifies computer resources and guarantees any app will run on any resources," Busby said. "For example, if you have two servers and one fails, with PAN Manager, the app on the failed server moves to the other one. Our software automatically discovers available resources. We guarantee any app you have can be deployed on any of these resources."

PAN Manager includes auto-failover to any blade it manages, regardless of vendor, with automatic rebooting of an application on the compute resource that is most similar to the one that failed, Busby said. And for disaster recovery, that makes it a good alternative to clustering.

"With PAN Manager, the spares are normally powered off," he said. "In a cluster, all nodes have to be provisioned with the app. With PAN Manager, you provision nodes only when needed. Thus cutting the hardware cost by sharing spares among multiple applications and software costs as no license is needed for the spares."

Egenera's new PAN Cloud Director is a self-service management portal that provides cloud lifecycle automation for applications running in a cloud built on physical or virtual server infrastructures. It supports all major hypervisors as well as native servers.

NEXT: Using PAN Manager And Options To Build Private Clouds

Customers can use PAN Cloud Director to create resource catalogs, discover and import resources into those catalogs, and customize the user interface for specific user or customer brands. It creates real-time quotes for resource requests and has integrated service level agreement (SLA) management.

The product's management interface provides tracking and billing for services, and it allows configuring of services based on the user's pre-designated role.

Also new is the PAN Domain Manager software, which extends PAN Manager support to up to 256 blade servers in up to 16 enclosures from different vendors into a single, heterogeneous pool of resources.

This provides the migration of server profiles transparently between different platforms, resulting in the ability to do auto failover and disaster recovery across blade servers from different vendors, Busby said.

Egenera's flagship PAN Manager software was also enhanced with a new plug-in to the VMware vCenter Orchestrator, which allows PAN environments to be accessed from VMware vDirector and vCloud.

"Customers will be able to select PAN Manager workflows and create PAN Manager types of entities with vCenter," Busby said. "They can also use it to set up certain resources that only VMware virtual machines run on. It's part of our multi-tenancy capability."

The new VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in also allows the building of a virtual machine in a VMware environment on a bare metal server, something that that was not possible before, Busby said.

Egenera's software is available primarily via indirect sales channels.