Egenera Brings Order To Data Center Chaos

Company:

Headquarters: Marlboro, Mass.

Technology Sector: Infrastructure

Key Product: PAN Manager

Year Founded: 2000

Number of Channel Partners: 30-plus worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: Egenera's management software opens new sales opportunities for channel partners targeting the much-ballyhooed data center market.

The Lowdown: Egenera was founded by Vern Brownell, a former CTO at Goldman Sachs who couldn't buy enough floor space, power and servers to keep operations going. Brownell developed a blade server infrastructure, as well as PAN Manager, which is now the vendor's flagship offering.

PAN Manager extracts information about what is in the data center, including storage, servers, host bus adapters and other equipment, without the need to crawl around on hands and knees, said Christine Crandell, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Egenera.

That information provides a framework for unified management of physical and virtual computing environments, and can be used to build a disaster recovery infrastructure for both physical and virtual computing environments, said Ken Oestreich, vice president of product marketing for the company.

PAN Manager saves the configuration of both physical and virtual servers so that if a server goes down, it can easily be rebuilt with all the same connections as the original, Oestreich said. "Just point the software to the new hardware, and the customer doesn't know the hardware was changed," he said.

The software gives data centers a large degree of flexibility so that customers can build blended environments consisting of local compute clouds, remote compute clouds, Software-as-a-Service and traditional IT operations, Crandell said.

PAN Manager has traditionally been a high-end product, in part because it was tied to Egenera's own blade server platform, Oestreich said. However, the company has started making it available as a stand-alone software product to channel partners and, more recently, through Dell via an OEM deal.

Because of the new software push, Egenera is moving to develop deeper relationships with the channel, Crandell said. The company late last year cut about 28 percent of its workforce, including several direct sales reps. "We're investing more in the indirect side, and less on the direct side," she said.