Egenera Launches EMEA Channel Program For PAN Manager Software

Egenera is planning to break the tie between its converged infrastructure software and the hardware on which it currently runs, and will be looking to build a channel partner community to bring the initiative to a wider market.

Egenera on Thursday took its first steps towards a channel-centric approach to the market by launching a formal channel program in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) geography for its PAN Manager software, and unveiled plans to bring its channel program to the U.S. in the near future.

Egenera also said it will make its PAN Manager available to a wider range of hardware platforms, said Ken Oestreich, vice president of marketing and channels for the Marlborough, Mass.-based vendor.

PAN Manager is a software application which virtualizes servers, I/O, and networks into scalable resources which can be quickly allocated and de-allocated as needed. The software also takes advantage of storage capacity in a data center to provide high availability and disaster recovery for mission-critical applications.

PAN Manager is the alternative for the channel to converged infrastructure vendors like Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, and the Acadia alliance of EMC, and other partners, Oestreich said.

Converged infrastructure is the tight integration of server, storage, networking, virtualization, and other resources tied together as part of a single-vendor, data center solution.

Such a solution can be managed as a single system. Its resources can be dynamically allocated as needed, providing higher resource utilization and availability than possible with static infrastructures.

"If you look at Acadia, those guys are doing the pre-integration," Oestreich said. "They potentially take business from the channel. Acadia will be a box pusher."

Customers will be looking to implement converged infrastructure because it is easier to run and manage than traditional data center infrastructures, Oestreich said. "But customer want to choose their hardware and software, and that's more of a channel play," he said.

Next: Breaking The Hardware-Software Bundle For Partners

Egenera has traditionally sold its PAN Manager software as part of a bundle including its own server blades or on blades from Dell or Fujitsu, Oestreich said. PAN Manager works with any vendors' iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage networking products, he said.

PAN Manager software sits on I/O drivers on server blades and on a separate controller server to let customers build virtual switches on the network, Oestreich said. It takes advantage of the server motherboards' built-in LAN-on-motherboard technology to let the network see any number of virtual network interface cards or host bus adapters.

The company expects its software to be available for a wider range of hardware platforms this Fall. It also plans to launch a formal channel program in North America this Summer.

"If converged infrastructure is going to be big, there will be space for a couple of independent players," he said. "And for this to happen, we have to be 100-percent channel, and 100-percent hardware-independent."

While Egenera is starting its formal channel push in EMEA, the company is already signing partners in the U.S., Oestreich said.

"In the U.S., we are on the road to signing channel partners, especially people who tell us they don't sell HP or Cisco, or who sell these products but are not authorized to offer their converged infrastructure offerings," he said.