Thursday, March 12, 2009

First fruits from the Dell/Egenera deal

It appears the Egenera/Dell deal is moving forward with velocity. A first joint customer was announced today, the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Corporate Data Center Operations (CDCO).

This is the first of a pipeline of customers buying-into Infrastructure Orchestration (also referred to as Fabric Computing or Unified Computing) - first offered in 2001 by Egenera with their high-end BladeFrame + PAN Manager software, and now being mainstreamed as the Dell PAN System by combining PAN Manager with Dell hardware.

The VA's CDCO is really a hosting facility - much the way an xSP hosts applications for third-parties. In this case, they're hosting a mission-critical application for an influenza early-warning system. I've met with their CTO, who's a pretty forward-thinking guy. He recognizes the fact that his "customers" frequently change requirements, and computing demands frequently change too. So, for an environment comprising physical databases and virtualized instances, the Egenera/Dell system provided significant agility (ability to re-provision quickly) while maintaining a mission-critical level of availability.

The Dell/Egenera deal has been getting some profile lately - as it takes on similar technologies such as IBM's Open Frabric Manager, and HP's Insight Orchestration products. Stay tuned for some more juicy news.

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