Egenera Gets Patent

MARLBORO, Mass. -- Egenera Inc., the data center virtualization company, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent No. 7,231,430 to the company for, "Reconfiguration, Virtual Processing System, Cluster, Network and Method," commonly known as the Egenera Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture. Egenera's PAN architecture virtualizes network, storage and compute resources, allowing application and data services to be provisioned, managed, migrated, and scaled transparently. The PAN architecture is the key enabling virtualization architecture behind all of the company's offerings - both hardware and software.

In related news, Egenera also announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent No. 7,228,265 for "System and method for emulating serial port communication," which provides access to Microsoft Windows® consoles in a virtualized environment.

Egenera's PAN architecture facilitates strategic software functions including N+1 high availability, N+1 disaster recovery (also a patented Egenera innovation), chargeback, multisystems management, and the seamless integration of virtual machine technology through Egenera® vBlade™ software. The company's flagship Egenera® BladeFrame® system, which fuses virtualization software - Egenera® PAN Manager™ software - and stateless, bladed Processing Blade™ modules, leverages the PAN architecture, producing a fully redundant, highly available and integrated system.

Similar in concept to a storage area network (SAN), in a PAN, server resources containing only processors and memory are controlled via Egenera PAN Manager software. Virtual networking provides scalable, flexible LAN resources and storage resources are also presented as virtual assets, housed on SAN or network attached storage (NAS) devices. Effectively, the compute, storage and networking resources within a system are virtualized into resource pools that are provisioned dynamically within BladeFrame systems or across multiple Frames.

"Our PAN architecture patent is undoubtedly the most important innovation recognition we've achieved in our history, as well as the most important enabler for our customers' success with Egenera solutions," said Pete Manca, executive vice president of Engineering and CTO for Egenera. "The PAN is at the heart of how Egenera helps customers break free from legacy infrastructure constraints and achieve new levels of agility and simplicity within the data center."Egenera Inc.