Egenera, the hardware company trying to turn into a software house, has announced its next-generation virtual and physical infrastructure management software, PAN Manager 5.2. Open APIs let customers and third parties integrate PAN commands and functions into their own software.

Egenera claims 1,300 licenses across 350 global customers for the widgetry, which Dell is reselling.

It’s supposed to reduce operational and capital expenditures by up to 70%.

PAN supports popular hypervisors, SANs and server platforms and manages hundreds of virtual and physical resources as a pool of assets to increase data center simplicity and business performance and extend failover to a broader set of computing resources with lower TCO.

Using I/O virtualization, an intelligent fabric and a stateless environment, PAN Manager enables any x86 server configuration to be defined once and moved wherever and whenever on-the-fly.

Other innovations in the update include Linux 2.6 kernel compatibility to run PAN controllers for enhanced performance; embedded Citrix 4.1 technology enabling Live Migration, support for Red Hat 64-bit operating systems and dynamic memory allocation; support for vLAN technology enabling flexibility in designing computing environments in the processing area network – the PAN; and support for WinPE 2.1 so customers can use industry standard tools to manage their Microsoft operating system deployments and provisioning.

• Beyond Virtualization to the Reliable, Dynamic Data Center