Dell-Egenera Partnership Shores Up Both Companies in Virtualization Market

Yesterday’s announcement of a partnership between Dell and Egenera has done something unique in the business development world -- increased the credibility of both players who were lagging in overall market presence in a key technology area -- server virtualization.

Egenera, a smaller server vendor, popular in financial services, public sector and service providers, was the first to bring Unix-class virtualization capabilities to x86 systems but did so only within its unique blade server frame design. As such, Egenera simply hasn’t been able to make much headway in the general enterprise market. A 2005 hardware OEM partnership with Fujitsu-Siemens was a step in the right direction but one only felt in Europe.

In 2007 to expand its market presence, the company announced that its PAN Manager virtualization management software would support non-Egenera servers. While the appeal of this announcement was mostly to its existing customers it was a shot across the bow of the virtualization management software market that Egenera was shifting to a more open position.

Dell has made significant market share gains with its servers and this quarter refreshed its family of blade servers with a new chassis and blade design. But simply having a competitive server portfolio isn’t enough to remain competitive today, vendors must add the ability to virtualize those workloads and quickly and easily move them among servers while also being able to move resource assignments during failover and replacement.

HP offers its Virtual Machine Manager and Virtual Connect, for virtualization management and resource assignment and IBM recently added its home-grown Open Fabric Manager, leaving Dell with a gaping competitive hole in virtualization management. Consider that hole soon to be filled with Dell PAN Manager.

Egenera PAN Manager has a stable of customer references and years of implementation behind it, making it one of the most mature virtualization management solutions on the market today. While its ability to virtualize workloads off-platform is relatively new, the Dell endorsement gives this capability instant credibility.

The partnership stops at PAN Manager, so don’t start thinking Dell at the low end and Egenera at the high end; that doesn’t seem to be in the offing. But synergies between the two companies through this partnership should benefit both vendors’ customers.

By James Staten

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Comments

[Used refurbished Laptops]

HP’s ONE multivendor alliance program is a logical step in adding more data center value for their existing ProCurve customers. Customers, however, must beware as “the devil is in the details” and even more so in “the operational complexity” that can result from trying to take advantage of infrastructure and equipment consolidation without having the supporting IP service integration properly designed and innovated.