Egenera announced that they are now offering the PAN Manager software on Fujitsu x86 servers in addition to the Dell and their own BladeFrame products. They also indicated that there will be another in first half of 2011.

This is one of the strengths of the PAN Manager software which is similar to what Cisco UCS offers. Where Cisco UCS is only run on Cisco hardware, the PAN software now offers a growing selection of Hardware vendors. This alleviates potential fears some companies may have of vendor lock in.

Egenera’s PAN Manager software has been around for 10+ years, ahead of its time in many aspects. Now with the explosion of Cloud and Virtualization systems like Egenera’s PAN Manager and Cisco’s UCS fit a need of a dynamic infrastructure to fit the dynamic needs of these areas.

Here is a quote from Egenera’s Press Release

Egenera today announced it has added PAN Manager® Software support for the Fujitsu PRIMERGY® BX900 Blade Server, continuing its thrust to deliver converged infrastructure solutions compatible with multiple vendors’ server and Virtual Machine (VM) technologies.  Already compatible with Dell hardware and Egenera’s own BladeFrame® offering, Fujitsu’s support is further evidence of Egenera’s commitment to delivering open, unified computing solutions that give customers the ability to select the virtualization, hardware and storage of their choice, thus avoiding vendor lock-in.

About Egenera PAN Manager Software
PAN Manager Software (based on Egenera’s Processing Area Network concept) combines the simplification benefits of unified computing with integrated high availability and disaster recovery services for physical and virtual servers. The software uses standard servers and Ethernet and creates server, I/O, networking and storage pools that can be easily re-allocated. The result is a business-critical infrastructure with massive hardware and operational efficiencies. With 10 years of rock-solid performance, PAN Manager is deployed at over 1,600 sites globally. The software currently supports hardware from Egenera, Dell and Fujitsu, and storage from 3Par, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp and others.