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Today, as in nearly every day, I had a conversation with someone who suddenly latches-on to the concept of Converged Infrastructure – it’s elegant, simple, efficient, effective. They get excited about its versatility, and how virtualization-of-the-infrastructure is the analogous next step to virtualization-of-the-OS. Then... they inevitably ask “But what are your differentiators?”.  And that’s the easy part! Because we’ve been at the converged infrastructure thing for nearly a decade longer than Cisco, HP or IBM. And we know the customer needs and objections well. So, how are we different? Let me count the ways:

1. We’re designed to be platform-neutral. That’s right – No hardware lock-in. Our IP is embedded in PAN Manager software, not in the hardware. And  PAN Manager is being ported to multiple server vendors. So you’ll be able to select the servers you want, yet manage them on a single fabric from a single converged infrastructure management console.
2. We base converged infrastructure on standard Ethernet. You read right – no expensive FCoE or InfiniBand. No vendor-specific Ethernet appliances or expensive switches. No CNAs or HBAs. Just standard on-board Ethernet ports, cables, switches. (But yes, we bridge to FC if you  want)
3. We’ve already integrated software provisioning, HA/failover, and Disaster Recovery. That means you don’t need to buy or integrate multiple products or third-party solutions. With HP you’ll find you need to page across a dozen products to get the functions you need. To get there using Cisco you’ll need to add Ionix, clustering software, EMC Powerpath and more. Consider the dollars you’ll save on licensing, maintenance, training and operations with Egenera.

Sometimes simplicity, elegance and logical design is all you really need to make a good IT choice.