PAN Builder
Cloud with Confidence

At the core of the PAN system are three PAN foundation services.

Stateless environment

All the servers in a PAN system are defined as stateless and anonymous, meaning that no server-specific or application-specific information is maintained locally.  Instead, firmware, operating system and application images reside on the SAN.

Intelligent fabric

The intelligent fabric is a fully-redundant, intra-system converged network that transmits internal and external disk and network traffic throughout the PAN system. The fabric provides the high-performance, secure -communication path that is necessary for creating shared processing pools and sharing those resources among the servers within a PAN system.

PAN systems meet each application’s I/O bandwidth requirements using quality-of-service guarantees. The secure converged network fabric also prevents intrusions, both from within the processing network and externally from remote locations.

I/O virtualization

I/O virtualization is an essential element in enabling application mobility. By abstracting physical interfaces such as NICs, HBAs, WWNs, MACs and KVM ports, applications can move to any server within the PAN system while retaining access to external resources. All I/O traffic (Data, Storage) is then transported along a secure converged network, and is eventually bridged to external data center devices with physical Network Interface Cards, Host Bus Adapters, etc.  By virtualizing the I/O, PAN Manager vastly reduces the physical I/O hardware needed in the environment, and creates a “wire-once” cabling infrastructure.

Egenera’s I/O virtualization supports several virtual device categories, including virtual Ethernet switches, vNICs, vWWN’s, disk and file systems, tape systems, CDROMs, and console devices. In addition, all virtual devices are automatically multi-path redundant.