Egenera announced that BroadRiver Communications Corporation has chosen the Egenera BladeFrame system and Egenera vBlade software for its new hosted virtual server offering.

BroadRiver combines the best of both worlds -- a full selection of products and services that can be customized to customer needs with prices for bundled services that are competitively priced. The customer's solution contains just the services they need, without having to pay a premium for not fitting into an inflexible "package." This flexibility enables BroadRiver to effectively provide customized solutions to many customers of different sizes, sectors and lines of business.

Egenera systems are highly available, flexible platforms that eliminate the need for managing numerous physical infrastructure components required in other platforms to provide value added services. With its patented Processing Area Network (PAN) virtualization technology, Egenera PAN Manager software replaces physical components with software equivalents and can repurpose and reallocate both physical servers and virtual machines, on demand or automatically. By virtualizing compute, storage and networking resources, PAN Manager software can re-allocate these resources in response to changes in business needs and opportunities, enabling customers to increase agility, decrease time to market, and reduce data center complexity.

"Among the many differentiators driving BroadRiver's success is its strong focus on offering users new products with enhanced functionality, while delivering higher service levels and reducing costs," said Joe Sheehan, CEO at BroadRiver. "The key differentiator with Egenera is the ability to manage all of our resources -- physical and virtual -- in a tightly integrated platform with a single management interface. This reduces operational costs, which in turn means savings that we can pass on to our clients. We also use Egenera's automatic failover capability to provide higher service levels to our customers."

Egenera vBlade software is an extension to Egenera PAN Manager software, which together allow customers to manage both their physical servers and virtual machines from a single interface and with all the high-level services Egenera provides for physical servers, including disaster recovery, N+1 failover and rapid re-provisioning. By integrating leading hypervisor technology directly into PAN Manager software, customers can easily allocate either a full server or a partition of a server based on the needs of the application. This approach eliminates the complexity of managing virtual machines and physical servers in different ways and eliminates the need to add another domain expert into the IT organization.

Sheehan continued, "Without using vBlade software we would certainly have had to add hardware, software and resources to the environment. Now that we can easily configure, change, manage and re-configure both physical and virtual computing resources with the Egenera solution, we have gained a competitive advantage to deliver a better set of hosted virtual products and services to our customers."

"As we continue to deploy the Egenera solution to our customer base, we see the opportunity to offer more value-added products and services including disaster recovery, service-level and usage based pricing, and expanded co-location services," concluded Sheehan.

"We're pleased to be working with BroadRiver, a visionary company with a strong value proposition for a broad set of customers," said Mike Thompson, president and CEO, Egenera. "Like BroadRiver, more and more service-oriented companies are implementing Egenera solutions to improve their responsiveness to ever changing customer requirements, offer better, cost effective reliability, and lower operational costs. We look forward to working closely to ensure Egenera continues to provide competitive advantage for BroadRiver and all our customers going forward."