INDUSTRY

Egenera today announced that that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent No. 7,174,390, titled "Address resolution protocol system and method in a virtual network." Egenera has earned numerous patents in virtualization, disaster recovery and failover, and power and cooling since its inception in 2000. Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) within conventional Ethernet networks associates server and application IP addresses with their Ethernet addresses. In systems such as the Egenera BladeFrame system that emulate Ethernet semantics on a high-bandwidth, low-latency, point-to-point fabric, virtual circuits in the fabric direct traffic flow. Typically, it is necessary to further convert Ethernet addresses into virtual circuit numbers whenever traffic is sent -- adding an extra table look-up for each transmission. Egenera's invention obviates the extra step by combining the virtual circuit table with the ARP table, lowering latency and processing overhead. "Egenera has a rich history of both innovation and its practical application that drives measurable value for our enterprise customers," said Pete Manca, executive vice president of Engineering and CTO, Egenera. "With a world-class engineering organization, Egenera continues to build a strong intellectual property portfolio that extends our lead and furthers our mission to power the next-generation virtual datacenter." Egenera was founded in March 2000 by Vern Brownell, former CTO of Goldman Sachs, based on his experience running one of the world's largest and most sophisticated datacenters. An early pioneer in pivotal markets such as virtualization, blade servers and utility computing, Egenera brings its experience and depth to a rapidly growing customer list of global enterprises, service providers and federal agencies.