Egenera brings PAN Manager to HP hardware

Converged infrastructure firm Egenera has inked a deal to offer its Processing Area Network (PAN) Manager on HP's BladeSystem server hardware.

Egenera chief executive Pete Manca said that the deal will greatly extend the reach of PAN Manager by opening up a larger share of the blade hardware market.

"We go from 15 per cent of the market to 70 per cent overnight. We are pretty excited about this," he told V3.co.uk.

Manca explained that PAN Manager is intended to simplify the management and operation of IT, aiming to consolidate I/O operations through a single blade server running the platform.

PAN Manager has allowed enterprises to dramatically reduce physical footprints and cut down on operational costs, according to Manca, and can help to complement server consolidation efforts from virtualisation platforms.

"The reality is that the hypervisors are great at server consolidation, but what they can't do is virtualise below the server. That is where converged infrastructure comes into play," he said. "It is essentially taking I/O and converging it down to a pair of wires."

The partnership with HP could also help to improve I/O performance on the platform. The BladeSystem modules hosting PAN Manager will also be equipped with HP's Virtual Connect FlexFabric module.

Manca said that the performance of PAN Manager systems using FlexFabric can be improved as much as 10 times over conventional systems.

HP will be the largest vendor to support PAN Manager, but customers will have other options. Dell and Fujitsu also offer support for the platform on their blade lines. Egenera also offers its own hardware, although Manca said that it is not actively hunting customers for its hardware line.

Egenera is not looking to lock on to a single hardware stack or vendor, which Manca believes will give the company an edge over some of its larger competitors that offer proprietary bundles.

"That is not what customers or the channel want," Manca said of the stack approach. "They want an open solution that is available on a lot of hardware platforms."