Egenera Inc and Oracle Corp announced availability of a new joint service designed to help customers easily deploy Oracle 10g RAC solutions on the Egenera BladeFrame system. Together, Egenera and Oracle deliver a Grid-ready infrastructure for the datacenter, including Oracle Database 10g, Oracle 10g RAC, Oracle Application Server 10g and Egenera's unique utility computing platform.

The new offering is a service engagement wherein skilled personnel from Egenera Professional Services and Oracle Consulting expedite implementation and deployment of the Oracle 10g RAC Grid software infrastructure on the Egenera BladeFrame. Already field-proven with existing joint customers, the turnkey solution minimizes risk while speeding time-to-market for Grid-based applications.

The Egenera BladeFrame's Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture, virtualization technology, and diskless Processing Blade design utilizing Intel Xeon processors and Intel Xeon processors MP bring unique benefits to the Oracle 10g RAC environment. Since any virtual server can assume any identity at any time, applications can share resources for demand spikes and high availability to lower costs and increase utilization. This utility computing model also enables IT to respond more quickly and effectively to rapidly changing business requirements. For simplicity, Egenera PAN Manager software has been integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control, enabling customers to seamlessly monitor, manage and access the Egenera BladeFrame system through Oracle's management interface.

"Egenera is the first systems supplier to announce an out-of-the-box joint solution with Oracle for its 10g RAC architecture," noted Mike Thompson, chief operating officer of Egenera. "As a Certified Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork, Egenera welcomes this increased level of cooperation and collaboration. Working with Oracle, we are pleased to help our joint customers more quickly and easily implement Grid computing and reap the benefits of Oracle 10g RAC running on the Egenera BladeFrame system."

"Egenera's BladeFrame system is an ideal Grid computing platform for the Oracle 10g stack," said Mark Salser, senior vice president of Oracle's Technology Business Unit. "By leveraging the success we've already seen with mutual customers, Oracle and Egenera have developed a proven, repeatable service that can help datacenters get up and running with Grid computing more quickly and cost-effectively."

"With Egenera's recently announced support for Intel Xeon processors with Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology, Egenera BladeFrame customers have the ability to take advantage of 64-bit performance," said Phil Brace, general manager of Enterprise Platforms Group Marketing at Intel Corp. "Now, customers running Oracle 10g RAC on the Egenera BladeFrame can seamlessly switch a node from 64- to 32-bit on the fly with virtually no downtime. Egenera's forthcoming Intel Itanium 2 processor-based blade will extend this Grid-based resource still further."