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Compared to 12 months ago, the term "converged infrastructure" is now practically a commonplace term. All major vendors -- Cisco, HP, IBM -- are offering their corporate version, their interpretation, their pre-configured systems.  And the press & analysts are eating-up the marketing for all of these proprietary solutions. Meanwhile, in the adjacent cloud computing space, another different evolution is happening. No sooner do multiple vendors begin to offer public clouds then the community demands open interoperability between them. So, where is the Open, multi-platform equivalent in the converged infrastructure space? A model that rejects hardware-specificity? My set of requirements would start with:

• designed to be hardware-independent
• operates on standard Ethernet with standard Ethernet switches
• is software-based
• unifies heterogeneous hardware on a single fabric
• integrates high-level services such as failover and disaster recovery
• rejects HW vendor-specific lock-in

I'm happy to say that this is Egenera's mission. And we've seen the light that others have missed.  10 years ago we too went down the tightly-integrated converged infrastructure hardware path, with the production-grade BladeFrame -- with 10,000's of blades in use on trading floors and data centers around the world.  And the light we saw was that the next logical step was to bring converged infrastructure technology into the software world -- so we un-bundled our PAN Manager software, creating an opportunity for a hardware-independent Converged Infrastructure system. Yet, we now see major vendors headed down a 10 year-old path of designing special-purpose hardware once again....  Meanwhile we like to think we're enlightened, now pursuing the multi-platform software path. You use the hardware and networking you already prefer, while attaining the cost-efficiency and simplicity you desire. Now, ask the other vendors about their plans to offer an Open converged infrastructure management system, and let me know what you find.