Egenera’s vBlade Delivers Unique Benefits

In April, Egenera finally began shipping its highly awaited vBlade software that adds virtual machine support to Egenera’s Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture. Virtualization by itself is growing more common every day and Egenera’s most recent milestone would not have attracted much attention on an ordinary blade server. But the Egenera BladeFrame is far from ordinary. What Egenera has accomplished is the creation of a totally virtualized blade server. With traditional blade servers, there is still a strong tie between the physical hardware, such as the CPU/memory, and the physical I/O. With the addition of virtual machines, Egenera not only releases the physical connection between the applications and the processors with its vBlade software, but also releases the connection of CPU/memory and the underlying hardware with its PAN Manager software. The result is true utility computing that Egenera refers to as "datacenter virtualization."

Egenera based this first iteration of vBlade on the Xen hypervisor, but wrote the software so that other hypervisors could be easily incorporated in the future. The future plan is to allow customers to choose the hypervisor that best meets their needs. The vBlade software itself is a plug-in to PAN Manager, which is the BladeFrame systems management software. By linking vBlade with PAN Manager, virtual machines have access to a number of virtualization services provided by PAN Manager, such as disaster recovery, automatic N+1 hardware failover, I/O consolidation, and simplified management of VMs. Integrating the two software products creates a single environment for configuring, repurposing, and managing the physical as well as the virtual resources on the BladeFrame.

Up to 32 vBlades can be run on a single physical blade. That in itself is not extraordinary. What is unique is that virtual machines can now be managed just like physical blades. The vBlade and PAN software actually simplify the management by shielding the user from much of the virtual machine complexity. As blade deployments grow well into the thousands of nodes, strong management capabilities become critically important. A second benefit is that change can occur very rapidly. Expanding or contracting the size of the VM, failing over, live migration, or suspend/resume can be accomplished within a matter of seconds due to the 100% virtual nature BladeFrame.

Egenera appears to be ahead of the competition in many ways with vBlade and PAN Manager. One of the major trends in blade servers is to be coupled with virtualization and Egenera clearly delivers on that point today. Ease of management has always been an issue with blades. As the node count increases in blade servers, complexity of management increases almost exponentially. Egenera addresses this issue by shielding administrators from much of this complexity. Egenera is delivering a product today that is years in the future for many other blade server vendors. BladeFrame is clearly not for everyone. It is expensive and it lacks the openness that some customers are beginning to demand. It may never catch IBM's BladeCenter or HP's BladeSystem. But what it will do is cause the industry to pause and take notice.

Comments

[Rick Barnard]

In response to the comment, vBlade is indeed shipping. The announcement is readily available on our Website.

We still see the majority of our competition from hardware vendors that are moving towards a consolidated virtualized IO infrastructure. HP has come the closest with Virtual Connect, which validates Egenera's architecture and vision (shipping since 2001).

There are some interesting startups of course, including Scalent. While interesting, they don't yet have anywhere close to the adoption and experience that Egenera has running mission critical production applications.

What we have seen is that customers want a simple solution that lowers their TCO, raises their utilization, and provides the availability and security required to run a data center today. That's what we do.

From what we know of Scalent, there are some inherent limitations in the technology:

* Non-captive fabric creates security and management complexity;
* Provisioning and HA services are not automatic and enterprise-ready

But the real "non-starter" that we see is that customers have to re-program the switch every time they want to make a change. In most enterprise cases, network admins aren't going to do that. It's a limitation of the architecture they’ve chosen.

Egenera is proven in production and has over 1000 systems running in 30 countries. The differences between Egenera and Scalent are many and varied – from architecture and strategy, to business practices and channels.

I'd welcome further dialogue with your commenter to clarify the differences between the Egenera and Scalent solutions. I can be reached at (US) 508.858.3000.

[Jim Burton]

Thank you for the comments on my bog. I have to admit that I did not look at Scalent Systems before I wrote the blog, but I will definitely check them out. With regard to your comment on whether I did my research or spoke with Egenera’s customers, I definitely did my research but did not speak directly with Egenera’s customers before writing the blog. Over the past year, I have visited all of the major blade server vendors and had personal meetings with many of the blade architects and engineers. I did extensive research based on the information supplied by vendors, supplemented by web research. With Egenera, I visited with Egenera’s engineers and played with one of their systems one afternoon. I have to admit I was quite impressed with what I saw. In response to your final comment of $$, we at IDEAS do not accept money in exchange for blogs. We only write what we honestly believe.

[andrabr]

Hardly new material here. First of all, I keep hearing claims of the
software-only PAN manager shipping, but I can't seem to find anyone with
a copy running -- and an Egenera employee told me it has actually
slipped to Nov-Dec of '07.

Also, seems like Scalent Systems (software, I read about them in
InfoWorld) does everything Egenera does and more (like, supports VMware
ESX, allows multicast, etc), on my existing x86 hardware. So I'm not
thinking Egenera is "ahead of the competition".

In fact, I recall Vern Brownell (Egenera founder) saying something at
The451Group Boston summit back in late '06 about "wanting to become more
like Scalent".

So, Jim, did you actually speak with customers and do research? Or just
swallow Egenera's PR (and $$?) hook line and sinker?