When it comes to infrastructure issues, Dell is not one of those vendor names that leaps automatically to mind, except as a very competitive supplier of `additional bits’. You want to expand the datacentre with some more servers and the company is always there on the RFT list. But when it comes to systems management choices it is not the most obvious name that springs into the frontal lobe. 

But there is the possibility that this will change now, following on from the recent news that the company has signed an OEM deal with Egenera for its Processing Area Network (PAN) management suite. The system has been getting some positive things said about it, and Fujitsu-Siemens has already signed up to OEM PAN into
Europe.  

It certainly works in a way that maps onto where some think the world is (however slowly) moving. That is to break away from the traditional concepts of the Von Neumann architecture where a server is a processor plus memory plus disk storage plus operating system plus application, and an infrastructure has lots of those building blocks. Instead PAN goes for far greater granularity, with everything being considered an asset that is available to be assigned to tasks as the management software determines. 

That shows strong conceptual similarities to moves in other areas, not least of which are the growing number of SaaS offerings, IBM’s open experiments with `cloud’ computing and even the potential that is starting to be waved around by the likes of Microsoft and Google. In essence, it becomes possible to build Demand-Response systems, ones that react to and manage the tasks required as and when the demand is made, even if it is unscheduled. 

This is, therefore, one of a group of early steps along the road to utility computing and aggregated service provision. Which is all very interesting except that there has to be a modicum of doubt about Dell’s place in this schema. The company’s history, indeed its significant success, has been built on high volume sales in a price competitive marketplace. Past interest in any area of systems management has tended to be provided by contracted third parties rather than the company itself. 

The Egnera website suggests that Dell will be integrating PAN with its servers, but there has to be some doubt about whether an `out of the box experience’ will be possible or whether third party expertise will be needed to get the best out of the combination. It might well work fine for small installations, but in a larger infrastructure it is still normally true that a good deal of expert hand-holding, tweaking and tuning is needed at the very least.  

Neither Egenera nor Dell has that sort of track record, yet at least.