Data Center Convergence Your Way

When it comes to the next generation of data center management, the popular notion is that this evolution will be driven by pre-integrated servers from companies such as Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM.

But for a lot of IT organizations, this approach to converging servers, storage and networking makes them a little wary. They already have investments in products from multiple vendors in these areas, and becoming overly dependent on one vendor is a cause for concern.

In that context, it’s worth noting the progress of Egenera, a provider of a software-only approach to convergence in the data center. Today the company announced an alliance with HP under which HP has agreed to make eGenera’s PAN Manager software available on HP’s BladeServer platform. This latest alliance follows similar deals with Fujitsu and Dell.

According to Egenera CEO Pete Manca, eGenera’s plan is extend its software-only approach across as many platforms as possible to give IT organizations all the benefits of data center convergence without having to be locked into one particular hardware vendor.

It will be interesting to see how many hardware vendors wind up supporting the Egenera approach or something like it. Obviously, systems vendors would like IT organizations to line up on their entire stack, but the probability that the majority of the IT market is ready to do that is relatively low. In the meantime, they still need to improve IT service management across heterogeneous environments that need to be brought together under a common management framework.