Egenera, Inc., Unveils Product and Architecture Purpose-Built for the Internet Data Center

Business Wire, April 24, 2001

Business/Technology Editors

MARLBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 24, 2001

--Egenera(TM) BladeFrame(TM) System and Egenera(TM) Processing

Area Network Architecture Speed Deployment, Simplify Management,

Enhance Reliability and Lower Costs--

--Ground-breaking Platform Leverages Intel(R) and Linux(R) to Set

a New Standard for Open, Enterprise-class Computing--

Egenera, Inc., an Internet-infrastructure company, today announced details of its forthcoming solution for data-center computing. The Company's BladeFrame(TM) system and Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture represent a radically new approach to deploying and managing processing capacity--the industry's first in over 20 years. Purpose-built for service providers and large enterprises with mission-critical operations, the patent-pending technology integrates hardware, software, networking and services to resolve major data-center pain points from a single platform.

"During my years as CTO at Goldman Sachs, our use of technology as a key business driver grew considerably," noted Vern Brownell, chief executive officer, Egenera, Inc. "As a result, the agility and performance of our data centers became increasingly mission-critical. In our efforts to reduce application time-to-market, ensure availability and become more flexible, server deployment was a primary hurdle. Realizing that nothing short of a totally new processing architecture could solve the problems my managers and system administrators routinely encountered, I founded Egenera. We believe that our comprehensive approach to improving the data center will resonate with customers and find favor in the marketplace."

"Increasingly, clients report that existing architectures and the complex nature of server deployment have become significant obstacles to launching new or enhanced Web-based applications," said William Hurley, program manager, Yankee Group. "Egenera's Processing Area Network portends a new paradigm for allocating, deploying and managing capacity that can have a considerable impact toward simplifying this crucial function for service providers and enterprises alike. With the BladeFrame, Egenera can transform the provisioning of processing power from a complex, physical process to a simple, virtual process."

The Egenera(TM) Processing Area Network (PAN) Architecture

By integrating processing, networking, management and high-availability functionality currently dispersed across server hardware, operating systems and data networks, Egenera creates a new architecture, the Processing Area Network, which consolidates and simplifies the allocation and management of computing power. With the BladeFrame, processing capacity can be increased, decreased and reallocated completely through software, while the machine is running, to support new applications or accommodate variable demand on existing applications without purchasing, installing or managing incremental equipment.

The Egenera(TM) BladeFrame(TM) System

Hardware

The BladeFrame creates a pool of up to 96 high-end Intel(R) processors deployable entirely through software and without physical intervention. The product consists of a 24x30x84-inch chassis containing 24 two-way and/or four-way SMP processing resources (Egenera Processing Blade(TM)), redundant central controllers (Egenera Control Blade(TM)), redundant integrated switches (Egenera Switch Blade(TM)) and a redundant interconnect mechanism (Egenera BladePlane(TM)). As few as six cables are required to connect the entire system redundantly to storage, the IP network and AC power.

The BladeFrame was engineered to complement Storage Area Network (SAN) technology, which is fast becoming a data-center mainstay. Thus, the stateless Processing Blades, which function just like conventional servers once configured, contain only processors and memory and require no external connections. Instead, all Ethernet and disk I/O is routed via the BladePlane through the Control Blades, which interface to the IP network and external storage (SAN or NAS [Network Attached Storage]). The Processing Blades communicate among themselves and with the Control Blades at speeds faster than Gigabit Ethernet via pre-wired connections to the Switch Blades.

Software

The BladeFrame system is configured and managed through Egenera PAN Manager(TM) software, which provides a single control point for allocating and monitoring both physical and logical resources. For example, customers create pServers, Egenera's equivalent of a conventional server, by associating individual Processing Blades with IP network and storage capacity. Likewise, users can establish multiple Logical PANs (LPAN) on a single BladeFrame to allocate physically distinct, secure resources to enterprise divisions or individual Application Service Provider (ASP) customers. Configuration of the high-availability and load-balancing clusters inherent to the Egenera architecture is also achieved through PAN Manager software. In addition, a customer can establish a pool of spare Processing Blades shared by the LPANs to provide incremental capacity and/or automatic failover.