Egenera, Inc., the data center virtualization company, announced that GXS, a leading provider of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce solutions, has deployed the Egenera BladeFrame system to support the newly launched GXS Trading Grid Ultra infrastructure. GXS Trading Grid facilitates the exchange of goods and services between companies, improves visibility into global logistics operations and enables the synchronization of product data within and between companies.

GXS Trading Grid Ultra, GXS' new high availability architecture, is the result of extensive software and hardware upgrades across GXS' global data centers. These upgrades -- which include the deployment of multiple Egenera systems -- are enabling:

--  Real-time, dual-continent failover;
--  99.9 percent availability (with higher service level options also
    available);
--  Lower total cost of operation;
--  On-demand capacity for traffic spikes;
--  Faster application time-to-market;
--  Consistent, scalable performance;
--  Automated fault recovery; and
--  Improved security.

"When launched in 2004, GXS Trading Grid was a truly visionary platform, taking GXS beyond its legacy as a traditional value added network and bringing customers new value in the forms of supply chain visibility, improved B2B functionality and greater efficiencies in cross-business processes," said Bob Kamba, senior vice president, global operations and CIO of GXS. "Through its contribution to the GXS Trading Grid platform, Egenera is helping us take that vision to the next level, building high availability solutions for our customers and improving the security and integrity of our customers' transactions."

In concert with technology from EMC, the Egenera BladeFrame improves the speed and performance of remote duplication and mirroring for failover between data centers. In the event of a disaster, this functionality ensures continued operation of GXS Trading Grid in the shortest timeframe possible. Likewise, Egenera's utility model enables the allocation of a single Egenera Processing Blade(TM) resource to back up multiple servers, supporting 99.9 percent availability.

"Electronic B2B transactions represent a mission-critical source of both data and revenue for GXS' customers," noted Mike Thompson, president and CEO, Egenera. "After evaluating blade servers from Egenera and the market-share leaders, GXS concluded that only the Egenera BladeFrame could lower costs and complexity while delivering the enterprise functionality their business required. We are pleased to welcome GXS as an Egenera customer."

To provide on-demand capacity, Egenera PAN Manager software can identify applications that are under-powered and automatically reallocate processing resources to accommodate traffic spikes. New services can also be launched faster than ever before: BladeFrame capacity is deployed in minutes versus the weeks required to provision GXS' previous mainframe and RISC hardware.