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What's Old is Still in Vogue When was the last time you saw a data center computing architecture that was 10 years old, yet going strong? You may not realize it, but the Egenera BladeFrame is just that. It was created back in 2001 by Vern Brownell (previously CTO at Goldman Sachs) and is still in use at 1,000's of production sites worldwide, and still being purchased! Vern observed that the overwhelming complexity of installing, provisioning, and re-configuring servers was a strategic disadvantage.  And he developed an architectural concept whereby

• Server blades were stateless: CPU and RAM only; no disk, no static I/O addressing;
• All physical networking was an infinitely re-configurable converged fabric;
• I/O and switching was entirely virtual;
• Storage connections were virtual

This was the concept of Egenera PAN Manager Software + BladeFrame. "PAN" represented the "Processing Area Network" akin to the SAN (Storage Area Network) where fungible resources could be interchangeably re-purposed, scaled, failed-over, etc. Imitation: The Finest Form of Flattery What's really telling about the Egenera architecture isn't just that it's still in use. What's really notable is that now, 10 years into its tenure, it's actually being adopted by other manufacturers! Whether you call it "unified computing" (Cisco), "converged infrastructure" (HP), or "Fabric-Based Infrastructure" (Gartner's Term), this technology is now - ironically - becoming one of the hottest areas in IT. So, something about the BladeFrame (and, something about converged infrastructure) must have a component of vision and value for the industry to continue to aggressively invest in it. That's because the concept of abstracting/virtualizing IT infrastructure is perfectly complementary to virtualizing the software domain.  In this manner the entire computing infrastructure -- software and hardware -- can be logically configured and controlled. And there's never a need for any physical reconfiguration at all. It also means

• Zero cost to purchase/configure I/O devices
• Eliminate  re-cabling... forever
• Elimination of switch reconfiguration
• No re-zoning SAN storage

Keeping Ahead of the Pack - The BladeFrame architecture is managed, and ultimately enabled, by Egenera PAN Manager software. Back in 2007, Egenera realized that all of the properties of BladeFrame could be made available on nearly any mainstream, volume third-party blade or server. Since then, Egenera has been releasing versions of PAN Manager on other servers -- including Dell in 2008, and Fujitsu in 2010. At least one additional major vendor will be added this year in early 2011. Using PAN Manager Software, off-the-shelf blades can be made to function with integrated IO Virtualization, converged networking, virtual switching and virtual storage connections. So, while competitors flatter Egenera with their own hardware equivalents of BladeFrame, Egenera itself is still a few steps ahead: This time using software to achieve what used to be possible only with special-purpose hardware. And yet, the BladeFrame platform, 10 years young, continues to support new mission-critical applications worldwide...