Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:
Egenera Inc., a leader in datacenter virtualization architecture, today unveiled Egenera® PAN ManagerTM 5.0, the fifth-generation software release for the Egenera BladeFrame® system. PAN Manager 5.0 enables multiple Egenera BladeFrame systems—hundreds of computing resources—to be managed as a single pool of assets in order to further enhance operational simplicity, extend failover to a broader set of computing resources, and lower total cost of ownership.
…
Among the major new and enhanced features in Egenera PAN Manager software release 5.0 are:
- BladeFarms
BladeFarms extend the PAN to encompass multiple Egenera EX systems creating a dramatically expanded pool of resources which can be managed by a single management console. Servers can now fail over to any of the Processing Blades within the BladeFarm. This capability extends the N+1 failover model to improve the flexibility and efficiency of failover pools and reduces the total cost of providing failover resources. In addition, clustered applications can draw additional processing resources from any Processing Blade in the BladeFarm.- Named Pools
Egenera systems allow customers to mix-and-match a variety of different Processing Blades within a single system or within a BladeFarm (e.g. 32-bit/64-bit; two-socket/four-socket, single core/dual core, AMD®/Intel®). Named pools enable customers to easily create computing pools or failover pools of specific types of assets within the PAN based on business and application requirements—providing greater choice, flexibility and granularity to maximize the efficient use of computing resources. For example, if a customer’s Oracle® database runs best on dual-core four-socket blades, customers can draw from a like Egenera blade in a named pool anywhere within the PAN.- Warm pBlades
Engineered for cost-effective high availability and rapid failover, “warm pBlades” are powered-up and paused in a “warm” state awaiting PAN Manager software to initiate an operating system boot—cutting total failover time in half. This gives customers an additional option in terms of failover, allowing them to choose different levels of availability needed for particular applications.- Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability Improvements
PAN Manager software release 5.0 features numerous RAS improvements, including expanded HBA status and performance data, disk performance data, and internal connection monitoring and status values for each connection.- Virtual Tape Support
As virtualization technologies continue to expand to new areas within the datacenter, Egenera extends the PAN architecture to encompass these new offerings. PAN Manager software release 5.0 now includes support for virtual tape for high-performance back-up. With an increasing number of customers running large database applications on Egenera platforms, there has been a corresponding need for rapid backup.