Dell PAN System

The Dell^TM  PAN System simplifies the rapid provisioning and repurposing of both physical and virtual server infrastructure, and provides unified high availability and verifiable disaster recovery. The result is an infrastructure with massive efficiencies and overall cost reduction for mission-critical applications.

The Dell PAN System combines PAN Manager^®  Software by Egenera^®  for Dell with Dell’s leading-edge PowerEdgeTM M600 or M610 blades and the M1000e Modular Blade Enclosure. All the processing is done on up to 16 Blade servers, where as the management services is run on 2 PowerEdge R710 servers at 2 units each. The combination delivers a true data center in just 14 units of Rack space, offering all the ROI benefits of an implementation on industry standard servers. Customers have a choice of Fibre Channel connected SAN storage or Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage systems.

Egenera is one of the industry leaders for helping customers turn data centers into reliable, flexible, data centers, quickly and easily. PAN Manager gives you the capabilities you need to create a flexible, policy-driven, highly-available and unified computing infrastructure.

Egenera has been delivering solutions to support customer’s mission critical applications since 2001. More than 1300 installations across 350 customers demonstrate the PAN System’s ability to manage and control both physical and virtual computing infrastructure. Such widespread use demonstrates the stability, maturity and industry hardening of the PAN System when used to simplify the control of complex workload distribution.

Egenera’s integrated enterprise data center solutions and powerful PAN Manager software are trusted globally to deliver value through agility, reliability and availability. Click here to learn more about Egenera.

Together, Dell and Egenera are changing the rules in the data center, enabling IT to bring innovation to the enterprise without breaking the budget. Now you can ramp up data center performance even while reducing operating expenses.

Egenera’s innovative approach to data center agility through PAN Manager Software, combined with Dell’s standards-based approach to computing, delivers a cost effective, energy-efficient solution that helps to create a truly reliable dynamic data center. The Dell PAN System can help organizations optimize use of available resources, and automatically power down unused or underused servers to help meet the power and cooling challenges presented by rising energy costs and increasing equipment density.

Dell has collaborated with Egenera to create the Dell PAN System. An implementation of Egenera’s PAN Manager software on Dell’s industry standard award winning hardware to deliver Data Centre functionality on a cost effective infrastructure.

The Dell PAN System is an integrated product that transforms Dell servers into flexible resources that can be rapidly and automatically allocated based on demand requirements. The Egenera PAN System software abstracts physical data center components (compute, I/O, network) so they can be flexibly managed to create a policy-based, highly-available computing platform.

The Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture used by the system creates flexible shared pools of processing resources using a high-performance fabric that connects servers and controllers within a single chassis. Together, this fabric and PAN Manager switching protocols constitute an I/O virtualization layer that helps significantly reduce the number of required peripheral interface devices while also helping reduce associated server power consumption across production, development, testing, and high-availability systems.

The Dell PAN System is a integrated data center solution that offers the following key benefits:

Reallocate resources with just a click: Provide capacity-on-demand by automatically creating or re-purposing resources.
The Dell PAN Manager helps administrators allocate processing resources to applications how they want, when they want, all with an intuitive interface. And when a situation changes, click a button and watch it respond. It’s just that simple.

Flexible HA Policies: Automatic high availability failover (N+1 high availability) without the need for clustering.
In the event of a node failure, the PAN Managers restart both the OS and application on a ‘hot spare’, or re-purpose an existing node without the need for any other clustering technology.

Protect Mission Critical Applications: Deliver verifiable disaster recovery – with rapid recovery time to recovery site.
The PAN managers work in conjunction with the storage area network (SAN) to implement Disaster Recovery policies at a low incremental cost, as well as easily verified DR testing.

Reduce Server Sprawl: Reduce the total number of servers, I/O connectivity, and manpower required in the data center to run a given workload.
Unused resources are pooled as bare metal until needed, and then re-purposed as new physical servers, virtual servers and/or new hosts, improving overall capital efficiency and reducing need for new capital outlays.

Dell ProSupport^* for IT is included with the Dell PAN System, giving IT administrators 7x24 access to Dell’s technical experts as well as professional training and certification, collaborative support for select third-party vendors, and a single point-of-contact escalation management. Dell ProSupport for IT allows IT staff to satisfy business demands while freeing their time to focus on strategic projects.