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Note: The partnership with Egenera allows HP to add more converged networking expertise and improved disaster recovery for data centers.
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Slideshow: Apotheker Takes The Stage, Paints An HP Cloud VisionHP is adding Egenera's blade management system as another arrow in its quiver in the continuing battle with Cisco Systems to offer the best unified computing services in the data center.
Egenera will layer a respected high availability and disaster recovery system onto the converged networking that HP already provides with its BladeSystem c7000 enclosures. Egenera's own ability to supply converged networking puts it in a position to leverage HP's switching capabilities and add management features on top of it.
HP blades and Egenera's PAN Manager management system "makes a great private cloud platform" for the highly virtualized x86 servers in the data center, claimed Egenera CEO Pete Manca in an interview before Thursday's announcement. The management system treats a set of blades as a single system, with pooled memory and storage. It manages applications running on the blades as components of multi-tenant systems, and can apply chargebacks for their use to individual users.
PAN Manager also converts the blade enclosure into a redundant, highly available computing system for critical production applications. In the event of a software fault or hardware failure, it offers automated disaster recovery.