Cloud management and data center infrastructure automation vendor Egenera recently announced the launch of Virtul Machine Instance (VMI) technology that enables the provisioning of physical and virtual servers in addition to its subsequent management. Egenera’s newly released VMI instances technology is enabled by its integration with the open source XenServer platform and allows Egenera customers to use its PAN Manager product to provision and manage XenServer-based virtual machines. The launch of Egenera’s VMI instances technology as part of its PAN Manager platform positions it to offer cloud management services to a more varied ecosystem of infrastructures as illustrated by the “XenServer VM” component of the graphic below:
Egenera’s PAN Cloud Director already supports the management of cloud infrastructures that leverage VMware’s vSphere and Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor. In addition, the PAN Cloud Director enables customers to manage Amazon Machine Instances-based machines deployed on the Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Compute platform. As told to Cloud Computing Today in a phone interview with Egenera’s VP of Marketing, John Humphreys, Egenera plans to extend the purview of the PAN Cloud Director platform to cloud infrastructures based on the KVM hypervisor as well as Windows Azure and Verizon Terremark. Last week’s VMI instances announcement builds upon a recent capital raise of $16M led by Comvest Partners that Egenera intends to use to accelerate its sales and marketing and product development initiatives. As hybrid cloud infrastructures increasingly become the de facto cloud deployment model, technologies such as Egenera’s PAN Cloud Manager and PAN Cloud Director are likely to transition from being “useful” to “necessary” for purposes of automating and streamlining IT infrastructure management spanning varied cloud and on premise infrastructures that leverage a range of virtualization platforms.
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