Dell and Egenera are partnering to deliver a fully integrated solution for employing dynamic data center environments. Egenera started out creating PAN Manager to operate with its own BladeFrame server technology; but last year, the company decided to open up its software to other hardware manufacturers. Fujitsu-Siemens was the first to sign an OEM agreement. And now, Dell.

The two companies intend to combine the Dell PowerEdge server line, a full suite of Dell's Infrastructure Consulting Services and Egenera's PAN Manager infrastructure virtualization software. The solution is designed to enable customers to simplify operations by creating and managing a single resource pool for both physical and virtualized servers.

"Dell is listening to customers and providing solutions that make the virtual data center easier to deploy and manage, regardless of platform," said Rick Becker, vice president, Dell Software & Solutions. "Dell and Egenera will help customers focus on company growth by delivering excellence in virtualized infrastructure from server performance, storage interoperability to dynamic data center management."

So how will Dell benefit from this relationship? According to this blog post by Jim Burton at IDEAS, "Dell has traditionally been firmly positioned in the industry-standard server space, providing a wide selection of servers at a great value. For virtualization, Dell PowerEdge servers support a host of third-party software, including VMware. Dell servers can be managed using the Dell OpenManage framework."

Burton continued, "In today's market, Dell can compete very effectively with other vendors on simple server virtualization and SANs. But what it lacks is a management tool that can pull everything together into an entirely virtualized datacenter. That is where PAN Manager comes into play. With PAN Manager, Dell leaps over many of its competitors with the ability to create the virtualized datacenter of the future today using inexpensive industry-standard components."

Egenera's PAN Manager supports virtualization technology from Citrix and VMware, and it will add support for Microsoft once Hyper-V is released.

Posted by David Marshall on March 26, 2008 08:40 PM