Egenera, Inc. is a multinational converged infrastructure technology company with corporate headquarters in Marlborough, Massachusetts in the United States. Egenera designs, manufactures, and sells blade servers as well as converged infrastructure management software, and offers consulting and training services related to its products and technologies. Egenera is a privately held company with over 350 employees.[1] Founded in March 2000, the company was named by Network World as one of the top 10 startups to watch in 2002[2] and was a winner in the annual "Red Herring 100 North America" award given by Red Herring magazine in 2006.[3]
Egenera maintains overseas headquarters in the United Kingdom, Japan and Hong Kong.
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Egenera was founded by Vern Brownell in March 2000. Prior to Egenera, he spent 11 years as chief technology officer for the financial firm Goldman Sachs Group in New York.[4] Under Mr. Brownell's leadership, Egenera pioneered the Processing Area Network (PAN) which is designed to virtualize and interconnect computing, storage and network resources, creating shared pools that can be centrally managed. Mr. Brownell conceived of the idea for PAN based on his experiences with growing data center complexity at Goldman Sachs.[5]
The company launched its first product, the Egenera BladeFrame, in October, 2001. BladeFrame is a combination of bladed servers, fabric backplane, firmware and management software. In October, 2006, Egenera announced its plan to create a separate line of business in order to make its virtualization management software, called PAN Manager, available under OEM agreement to other server vendors.[6]
Egenera has received numerous patents for its technology, including the Processing Area Network, N+1 disaster recovery and virtualized server failover technology.[7]
BladeFrame is a hardware product that combines bladed servers together with storage and network virtualization technology in a single package. A BladeFrame consists of a chassis, backplane, specialty blades, and multiple bladed servers.
Each server, called a "pBlade", contains one or more Intel or AMD processors. pBlades are considered stateless because they are composed only of processors and memory, and do not contain disk drives, direct interfaces to external devices, or other elements that associate the server with a specific identity.
Specialty blades include a Switch Blade (sBlade) that implements networking protocols among the pBlades and a Control Blade (cBlade) that manages the BladeFrame and connects the BladeFrame to external storage and data networks. Communication among the blades takes place over a redundant, high-performance backplane fabric with up to 10 Gigabits-per-second throughput. All system and application software is loaded onto the server blades from an attached storage area network (SAN).
The BladeFrame EX supports up to 24 server blades per chassis and the BladeFrame ES supports up to six blades per chassis.[8][9]
PAN Manager is Egenera's management software for aggregating pools of compute, storage and network resources into a Processing Area Network (PAN) similar in architecture to unified computing systems. An XML-based specification, called an "abstract server definition", specifies a portable definition of system and application software along with associated PAN resource components such as network and storage addresses. The server definition capability allows IT administrators using PAN Manager to assign applications to any physical server or virtual server within the PAN for purposes of server provisioning, application availability and disaster recovery.
PAN Manager integrates XenEnterprise hypervisor software from XenSource into a service called PAN vmBuilder (formerly vBlade).[10] vmBuilder provides the capability to automatically install and configure a hypervisor instance on any server within the PAN.
PAN Manager's high-level capabilities include:
PAN Manager is independent of server form factor and works with Egenera BladeFrame, servers from Egenera's OEM partners and blade systems from HP[11][12] and Dell.
Egenera's senior management is:
Egenera primarily serves the IT markets for financial services, banking, service providers, telecommunications and government.[13]
As of 2008, Egenera has OEM agreements with the following vendors: