Marlboro-based virtualization datacenter solution provider, Egenera, has been awarded US Patent No. 7,178,059 by the US Patent and Trademark Office for its new N+1 disaster recovery system.

According to the company, their disaster recovery technology simplifies and accelerates moving entire clusters of servers, including their storage and networking connections, to a remote site. Leveraging Egenera's Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture, clusters are reinstated within minutes at the new site, without hardware configuration.

A single back-up site can adopt the configuration of any number of primary sites on demand. They claim this unique N+1 approach provides complete yet simple disaster recovery at the lowest cost, without the physical and management complexities typical of physical replication approaches.

The company designed their approach to create pools of compute, storage and network resources that can be dynamically allocated to applications as needed. Its PAN virtualizes server and network resources in the same way that a Storage Area Network (SAN) virtualizes storage resources, resulting in the ability to securely share allocate processing resources across applications; dramatically reduce complexity; enhance agility; and lower the cost of capital and operational expenses.

"During one of our DR tests with Egenera, we had the application up and running again in three minutes. I've had experiences where even under planned power downs we would build-in two to three weeks to failover complex, legacy systems - and the actual move would have taken seven hours," said James Crum, manager, Infrastructure Technology Services at Farm Bureau-Western Computer Services, Inc.

"We understand that designing, implementing or updating a DR strategy is one of the most strategic IT projects any organization undertakes. Replicating rigid, legacy environments across multiple sites only multiplies complexity and cost by at least a factor of two - all without meeting a single acceptable recovery time objective," said Pete Manca, EVP of engineering and CTO, Egenera.

Posted by David Marshall on June 24, 2007 03:08 PM