Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:
Egenera Inc., the data center virtualization company, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent No. 7,178,059 to the company for its innovation in N+1 disaster recovery. Entitled “Disaster recovery for processing resources using configurable deployment platform,” this patent further confirms Egenera as a leader in verifiable, cost-effective disaster recovery. Since the company’s inception in 2000, Egenera has earned numerous patents in virtualization, failover, and power and cooling.
Egenera’s disaster recovery technology simplifies and accelerates moving entire clusters of servers, including their storage and networking connections, to a remote site. Leveraging Egenera’s Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture, clusters are reinstated within minutes at the new site, without hardware configuration. A single back-up site can adopt the configuration of any number of primary sites on demand. This unique N+1 approach provides complete yet simple disaster recovery at the lowest cost, without the physical and management complexities typical of physical replication approaches…