Egenera, 3PARdata Strengthen the Data Center

Officials claim the move to make Egenera's BladeFrame servers and 3PARdata's InServ storage devices interoperable gets customers a step closer to a utility computing model.

Egenera Inc. and 3PARdata Inc. are teaming up to give enterprises a virtualized server and storage offering for their data centers.

In a joint marketing and support agreement announced Tuesday, the two companies say their products—Egeneras BladeFrame servers and 3PARdatas InServ storage devices—are interoperable, a move officials say gets customers a step closer to a utility computing model.

The companies have been working together for about nine months, ensuring that the two products can work together, said Susan Davis, vice president for product marketing and management at Marlboro, Mass.-based Egenera.

"This assures the customer that the products are tested together and that they work properly," Davis said.

In addition, the alliance calls for a joint support agreement in which both companies will answer users service needs. 3PARdata, of Freemont, Calif., also is joining Egeneras Accelerate Alliance Program, and Egenera is a member in the 3PARdata Alliance.

Craig Nunes, senior director of marketing for 3PARdata, said the alliance made sense, that it is a partnership between two companies that approach problems in two different areas within the data center—hardware and storage—from similar directions.

Egenera offers stateless blade servers—systems that have no disks, only processors and memory—with software that virtualizes everything else. The idea is to make data center resources as flexible as possible to respond to the changing business needs of the customers. The company targets high-end customers in such spaces as financial services, telecommunications and government.

For its part, 3PARdata offers its InServ Storage Server System, which also offers a combination of hardware and virtualization software.

The companies also have announced two customer wins, the Matsushita Electric Works Information Systems Co. Ltd., of Osaka, Japan, and Savvis Communications, of Herndon, Va., both of which are creating virtualized platforms within their data centers. The latter deal also included technology from Inkra Networks Corp., which offers virtualized networking products.

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