Introduction

A Processing Area Network or “PAN” is a distributed set of physical and virtual resources, including processors, and network and storage connections. These resources are both internal and external to the platform’s domain, and are bound into servers (pServers) through software.

PAN Manager software transforms all the management aspects of a modern datacenter, from processing resources and hardware switches to software images and event monitoring for physical components, into virtual objects that are unified under a single point of control. PAN Manager helps you convert your object groupings into deployable configurations. This allows you to group your hardware processing resources, network resources, and storage resources to respond to the datacenter’s needs, and to extend the standard infrastructure of the underlying hardware/software platform.

The domain’s computing infrastructure allows your site’s SAN and LAN infrastructure to remain outside of the domain and the PAN, giving you significant flexibility in tailoring the datacenter environment to your needs.

Figure 1 illustrates the logical model for PAN architecture: the physical and logical components of the domain, as well as LPAN resources that do not have an equivalent hardware component.

Figure 1 : Logical PAN architecture

Customers use the Egenera PAN Manager to transform their static IT environments and deliver scalable and reliable IT services. Real/potential failures (if any) in the operations of the PAN Manager, will hence affect the delivery of these mission-critical IT services. To avoid such an outcome, health checks should be periodically performed on the core components of the Egenera PAN manager, so that issues are proactively detected and intimated to the administrators.