Egenera Blog

Perched at the Inflection Point

Pete Manca — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:04:48 +0000

Egenera – as well as much of the IT industry – is standing at an exciting point in its evolution. When Egenera was founded in 2000, nearly nobody had heard of virtual I/O or converged networking. In fact, blade servers were hardly part of the vernacular. But the company had a vision of simplified data center [...]

First-Mover Advantage & Unified Computing

Ken Oestreich — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:59:21 +0000

I had to chuckle a bit when I read a recent claim that Cisco’s UCS was the “first” unified computing system certified on Oracle 10g and 11g RAC. That’s just plain false. So stop the presses: To set the record straight, it was actually Egenera (using PAN Manager software) that was first… announcing 9i support back [...]

On The Virtues of (IT) Simplicity

Ken Oestreich — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:08:21 +0000

Everybody’s talking about IT infrastructure/operations simplification, but only a few are taking concrete action to do something about it. So consider two views of simplification: (1) simplification at the “modular building-block” scale, and (2) simplification at the management/operations scale. Egenera’s customers have been driving us on both of these issues, hence our announcement of a number of [...]

Sometimes first-movers DO have advantages

Ken Oestreich — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:38:50 +0000

Lots of buzz in the air about Cisco entering the server market with the Unified Computing System – using the words “Revolutionary”, “Breakthrough”, etc. Now, to have Cisco enter the server market is certainly revolutionary… but neither their technology nor their business value is particulary new. But their marketing sure turned-up the volume on it [...]

More pricing info emerges on Cisco UCS…

Dan Busby — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:38:42 +0000

Well, the June 12th Channel Register report on Cisco UCS prices certainly changes the conclusions of the original Cisco price comparison done in April. For Blades, assuming the “Legacy” Blade Price used by Cisco in the original comparison is the actual List Price of a “Legacy” Nehalem Blade (Cisco agreed that HP was [...]

Explaining RTI architectures

Pete Manca — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:41:50 +0000

With the entry of new products to the market such as Cisco’s UCS and HP’s Matrix Operating Environment - a new name for HP’s collection of tools - I thought it would be worthwhile to re-visit the architectures for Real Time Infrastructure and discuss the different approaches and what the strengths/weaknesses are of each. Specifically, [...]

Virtual Switching - What’s it all about?

Pete Manca — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:09:08 +0000

Seems like virtual switches are now the new “it” thing. Cisco announced one that plugs in to VMWare environments. Now comes news from Citrix Syngergy that they are also developing a virtual switch for Xen and KVM. Why all the buzz over virtual switching? There are 2 good reasons for virtual switches - one is to [...]

A closer look at Cisco pricing

Dan Busby — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:22:25 +0000

Back on 16 April, Cisco began its marketing push on its Unified Computing System (UCS) hyping the fundamental cost savings it provides – as much as 31% over traditional approaches for a large scale-out implementation. But after close scrutiny, Cisco either needs to check their math or adjust their pricing. Their claims about TCO, bandwidth etc. [...]

RAC Moves Mainstream - But Slower Than It Could Have?

Alan Chhabra — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:01:16 +0000

Gartner’s recent article Oracle RAC Moved to Mainstream Use made me think about how important Oracle’s work has been around RAC — but also how its progress could have been even faster if not for stubborn complexity of the underlying physical infrastructure. Let me explain with an example. Oracle Grid, aka Oracle RAC, allows database [...]

A great description of PAN

Pete Manca — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:50:52 +0000

Check out the post fellow blogger and colleague Ken Oestreich wrote recently. It’s a great description of the Processing Area Network. Sometimes a picture/video is better than text and Ken does a great job illustrating the architecture and value of PAN. Given all the buzz around Cisco UCS, Ken’s blog is timely and informative. Way to [...]