Customer Case Studies

"Egenera has an impressive track record of being first to market with blade servers based on the latest Intel technology," explains Sprachman. "Insyde's product and expert engineering services enable us to introduce new offerings quickly and efficiently while implementing a common firmware development environment that will allow us to quickly port this differentiated value across future Egenera products."

Egenera

Egenera Inc., a leader in utility computing, chose the InsydeH2O's product to drive the industry's first blade frame system featuring the Intel?Itanium?2 Processor using the Intel EFI Framework. The Egenera's BladeFrame?product family simplifies the datacenter with an innovative server architecture specifically designed to reduce complexity and enable IT to respond rapidly to business requirements. The combination of Intel's highest-performing, most reliable server platform and Insyde Software's InsydeH2O system software will enable Egenera to roll out this and future server solutions with greater speed, innovation, and reliability.

Egenera focused on three key areas when selecting Insyde as a firmware and engineering services provider. Insyde's services enabled Egenera to extend their team on the project alllowing more time to focus on value added components.

• Infrastructure: Code Availability, Tools and Intel Relationships - Egenera took advantage of the Insyde's close working relationship with Intel and other silicon makers as well as web based development tools to track the firmware issues and resolutions

• Support: Core Knowledge, Engineer-to-Engineer Relationships - Insyde's engineers have over 15+ years of experience interfacing with customers. The Engineer to Engineer relationship ensures that questions get answered by engineers working on the project

• Technology: Framework Expertise, Silicon and Reference Platform Readiness - Egenera took advantage of the fact that Insyde has fully functional reference design. Issues were debugged both on the Egenera Platform and on the reference platform reducing overall time to production ready code.

Ben Sprachman, Egenera's Vice President of Hardware Engineering, contacted Insyde Software in search of advanced firmware technology that would enable Egenera to quickly and easily expand its own product offering. Egenera selected the InsydeH2O firmware over a traditional BIOS solution because it offers a number of key technical benefits including:

• A modular firmware architecture that captures Egenera's value-added functionality and can be moved easily between platforms
• A common firmware development environment written in "C" language and one that conforms to open source components
• An architecture that enables effective outsourcing of critical firmware components and device drivers
• Accessibility to fully functional reference hardware, which facilitates debugging

Once the Egenera engaged, Insyde engineers were able to complete a number of critical components of the Egenera firmware including but not limited to:

• Board Bring-up
• Board Debug
• ASL Code
• IPMI / MCA
• Enhanced Memory Test
• New and Modified Drivers
• NVRAM Removal (Egenera pBlades are “Stateless”)

Also due to both the close working relationship and the success of the project,. Egenera and Insyde jointly presented at the Fall IDF 2005 in San Francisco. The talk entitled "EFI Framework for Servers: A utility computing customer's report card", discussed the promise and pitfalls in a real world environment and in understanding the key components of the Framework required to develop a successful product

For more information, visit http://www.egenera.com or read the full press release on our partnership

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