The core product offering from Egenera, PAN Manager enables administration and management of what the vendor calls Processor Area Networks (PANs), collections of physical CPUs, storage, and network gear that can be managed as virtual resource pools and accommodate the definition of virtual servers (each virtual server is defined with its own CPU, storage, O/S, and networking configurations). In brief, PAN Manager enables the definition and management of the physical resources, the creation of virtual resources (i.e., the specification of the CPUs and/or blades, the networking requirements, and storage allocations for the virtual servers), and the management of those virtual resources (stop/start, failover definition, etc.). The product is itself accessible via a GUI (Web-based) or a CLI.

The product is initially designed to work with the vendor's own BladeFrame hardware, blade-based systems in which multiple diskless processors are plugged into a chassis and controlled via a pair of redundant controller blades that themselves house the PAN Manager software. The BladeFrame chassis handles the consolidation of the power connections to the housed gear, as well as the communications between the processing blades and the control blades. Two models of BladeFrames are available: The ES model, which fits into a standard rack and supports up to six processing blades; and the EX model, which is itself the size of a full rack and houses up to 24 processing blades. The EX model additionally includes a pair of network processing blades through which all internal and external network connections are defined (in the ES model, the controller blades themselves handle network connectivity). In both cases, storage is via connection to existing SAN or NAS infrastructure.

In addition to its ability to define and control virtual servers--which can be configured to use specific processing blades, virtual CPU assignments within a processing blade (up to 32 virtual servers supported per blade), or automatically select a processing resource from the available pool--PAN Manager provides the ability to define failover blade allocations (a failed virtual server definition can be automatically reprovisioned and restarted on the failover blade) as well as provides disaster recovery capabilities, in which a single PAN Manager based site can serve as the disaster recovery site for multiple other PAN Manager-based sites. Virtual servers can also be automatically/dynamically reprovisioned as needed based on admin-defined usage policies.

PAN Manager is itself divided into several modules. The PAN Builder provides the core configuration, automation, and management of virtual servers; while the PAN Server Portability and PAN Portability modules provide the server and site-based server migration capabilities for failover, dynamic provisioning, and disaster recovery capabilities. Finally, the PAN vmBuilder provides the platform with its server virtualization capabilities.

New from the vendor is a PAN Manager based system served on Dell hardware. Dubbed the Dell / PAN System, the combined product provides PAN Manager based platform management over PowerEdge servers in conjunction with "standard network and storage resources." The Dell / PAN System leverages external switches to provide the networking fabric that would normally exist in a BladeFrame.

Pan Manager, the BladeFrames, and the Dell / PAN system are available now. Contact the vendor for further information.