Dell / PAN System by Egenera = Utopia
Dec 1st, 2008 by Clint Eschberger
What is a utopian data center? It has always been desired for obvious reasons, but has never really been attainable. Data centers have become overly complex over the last decade due to so many different levels of management to keep up with the growing demand of servers and trying to keep it from getting out of hand. What was a simple idea of distributed systems has become a reality of dysfunctional systems due to all of the different layers needed to handle ideas like high availability, disaster recovery, provisioning, etc.
Virtualization technologies like the hypervisor were supposed to help solve these problems and to some degree they have. In other cases, they have merely moved the problem from the physical world to the virtual world. Although many issues have been helped by the hypervisor, it has not been able to solve them all. With support issues, performance limitations, and management overhead there is still many layers of complexity to beat.
Egenera’s focus has been to bring calm to the chaos, simplicity to the complexity, orchestration to the data center. PAN (Processing Area Network) has been able to bring true DR, HA, and management to the virtualization world and the physical world alike. For a long time this has been by using a combination of the Egenera BladeFrame and PAN, which is a powerful combination in its own right.
Dell’s focus is simplifying the data center, which is why Dell and PAN were such a great fit. The Dell machine has an amazing reach with its line of products and services that delve into data centers everywhere. They have a great focus on the idea that a data center does not have to be complex to be powerful.
The Dell / PAN System by Egenera is a great step to bringing the utopian data center to life. The ability to run mission- and business-critical applications on x86 platforms and provide the security blankets of high availability and disasters recovery. The ability to have a true lights-out management of the environment keeping System Administrators at home at those early hours of the morning, sleeping soundly knowing that their critical systems are fine.
What is a utopian data center? I think we have found it!