Egenera Inc. and 3Pardata Inc. are teaming up to give enterprises a virtualized server and storage offering for data centers.
The companies have been working together for about nine months to ensure that Egeneras BladeFrame servers and 3Pardatas InServ Storage Servers are interoperable, a move officials said gets customers a step closer to a utility computing model.
Egenera, of Marlboro, Mass., and 3Pardata last week announced a joint marketing and support pact under which the companies will answer users service needs. 3Pardata, of Fremont, Calif., is joining Egeneras Accelerate Alliance Program, and Egenera belongs to the 3Pardata Alliance.
3Pardata officials said the partnership makes sense because the two companies approach problems in different areas in the data center—computing and storage—from similar directions. 3Pardatas InServ Storage Server system combines hardware and virtualization software.
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Egenera offers stateless blade servers—systems with 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 customers changing business needs. The company targets high-end customers in such areas as financial services, telecommunications and government. Egeneras combination of virtualization software and commitment to Linux is a key differentiator in the server space, officials said.
Managed service provider Savvis Communications Corp., of Herndon, Va., has created virtualized infrastructures in three of its 24 data centers using Egenera and 3Pardata technologies. Savvis can dynamically provision and deploy the compute resources in those data centers, giving customers greater flexibility and high availability and reducing costs by up to 50 percent over more traditional, dedicated infrastructures, said Chairman and CEO Rob McCormick.
“Because youre not assigning long-term functionality to a server, people dont need as many servers,” McCormick said. “Much of what is in data centers now is common stuff, and customers are looking for a cost-effective way to run that common stuff, and theyre looking for a way to run it effectively.”
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