On Tuesday, Dell and Egenera will be announcing a strategic OEM agreement where Egenera’s PAN Manager will be available on Dell PowerEdge servers. PAN Manager is a unique management tool that is at the heart of Egenera’s enterprise BladeFrame servers, providing the ability to virtualize and manage not only virtual server environments, but also storage and I/O. Essentially, PAN Manager allows IT managers to create an entire virtual datacenter where nothing is tied to physical hardware. Compute, storage, and network resources can be dynamically allocated when needed and where needed. PAN Manager includes application clustering that allows virtual servers to failover automatically, and also full server failover to remote locations for disaster tolerance. All of these capabilities are tied together with a strong Egenera management framework that implements the high level of security demanded by many of Egenera’s financial services and government customers.
How will Dell benefit from this relationship? 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. 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.
Will this OEM relationship ultimately be extended to Sun, HP, and IBM, allowing the creation of heterogeneous virtualized datacenters? IDEAS feels that it is unlikely that HP and IBM will be offered the opportunity to partner with Egenera due to the intense competition Egenera experiences from these two vendors on a daily basis. But Sun may be a real possibility in the future. Sun already has a long-term OEM relationship with Fujitsu and Fujitsu Siemens has an OEM relationship with Egenera for PAN Manager. However, neither Sun nor Egenera has indicated that a deal is in the works.
We at IDEAS feel the OEM relationship is a win-win for Dell and Egenera, as well as the customers of both companies. This deal actually began when Egenera’s customers, who also own Dell servers, asked both companies to extend the benefits of Egenera’s virtual datacenter to Dell’s commodity hardware. The Egenera BladeFrame with PAN Manager is an outstanding product, but its cost precludes many IT departments from deploying it in general computing environments. However, the low price of the PowerEdge servers allows Egenera’s virtual datacenter to be brought into the mainstream server market, giving Dell an advantage that IBM, HP, and Sun cannot match. This relationship could really become very interesting should Dell decide to deploy PAN Manager on its new PowerEdge M1000e blade servers, or link PAN Manager into the OpenManage framework. Neither of these projects has been formally announced, but they both make sense as the relationship grows and matures. If you currently deploy Dell servers, you owe it to yourself to learn a little more about this new Dell/Egenera relationship.
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