U.S. Census Bureau Chooses Egenera for Utility Computing.

MARLBORO, Mass. -- Egenera Inc., a global leader in utility computing, today announced that the U.S. Census Bureau has adopted the Egenera(R) BladeFrame(R) system as one of the platforms in the Census Bureau Utility Computing Environment (CBUCE).

A directive of the Census CIO, CBUCE seeks to reduce the cost and complexity of datacenter infrastructure by recentralizing the Bureau's IT function, which had become distributed into silos of departmental systems, and by replacing proprietary RISC/UNIX servers with open platforms running Red Hat(R) Enterprise Linux(R) and Microsoft(R) Windows(R). Along with cost savings, anticipated results of this in-house hosting model include better service levels, resource utilization and IT responsiveness; faster application time to market; and simpler management.

In addition, the Census Bureau is teaming with Egenera Professional Services to further accelerate its adoption of utility computing. Initiatives are underway around datacenter process design and engineering, utility hosting for the application lifecycle, and migration to Oracle 10g. An onsite Egenera residency engineer ensures program quality. Moreover, the system administrators managing the Egenera BladeFrame systems were fully trained in just one week.

"Utility computing is the future of datacenter infrastructure at the Census," said Thomas J. Berti, CSVD, BCC, U.S. Census Bureau. "Capitalizing on this vision means eliminating dedicated servers in favor of flexible resources that can be allocated to any application at any time. It means delivering processing capacity to our clients in minutes or hours instead of weeks or months. And it means sharing systems across departments for high availability and continuity of operations, improving utilization, consolidating servers and reducing both capital and operational costs."

Berti continued, "In choosing the platforms for CBUCE, we found the utility computing capabilities of the Egenera BladeFrame very desirable. At the same time, it offered low total cost of ownership. Also significant is the responsive, hands-on support Egenera provides. This combination of forward-thinking functionality, quantifiable savings and top-notch service convinced us that the Egenera BladeFrame was an exceptional investment in our datacenter's future."

"We applaud the Census Bureau's goal to provide the best mix of timeliness, relevancy, quality and cost for the data they collect and the services they provide," said Bob Dutkowsky, chairman, president and CEO, Egenera. "Clearly, IT infrastructure is critical to achieving this objective. The utility computing environment being deployed by the Bureau is one of the most visionary we've seen. Egenera is proud to be part of this groundbreaking initiative with one of our federal government's key civilian agencies."

Initial Application: MAF/TIGER

The Egenera BladeFrame is being used for compute-intensive, mission-critical applications in the new utility environment.

The first of these is the Master Address File/Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing Accuracy Improvement Project (MAF/TIGER(R) AIP). The MAF, or Master Address File, is designed to be a complete and current list of all addresses and locations where people live or work, covering an estimated 115 million residences as well as 60 million businesses and other structures in the U.S. The TIGER portion of the project is a digital database that identifies the type, location and name of streets, rivers, railroads and other geographic features, and geospatially defines their relationships to each other, to the MAF addresses, and to numerous other entities.

The decision to port MAF/TIGER to the Egenera BladeFrame was based on its utility computing features and on performance of the dual-core AMD Opteron(TM) processors selected by the Census Bureau. With four CPUs and 32 GB of memory on each Egenera Processing Blade(TM) module, MAF/TIGER can be supported by the equivalent of 24 very powerful eight-way servers in a single chassis. The exceptional performance of the AMD-based blades should also contribute to unprecedented server consolidation.

The Census Bureau's Geography Division maintains both the MAF and TIGER databases, which are being migrated to Oracle Database 10g with Real Application Clusters (RAC) as part of the professional services engagement with Egenera. The first relational database designed for utility computing, Oracle Database 10g RAC coordinates multiple processing and storage resources as a single, self-managing grid.

About Egenera Inc.

Egenera is a global leader in delivering computing solutions that simplify datacenter operations and infrastructure. The Egenera BladeFrame product family simplifies the datacenter with an innovative server architecture specifically designed to reduce complexity and enable IT to respond rapidly to business requirements. Market-leading enterprises around the world trust the Egenera BladeFrame system to run their most important business applications and achieve higher resource utilization, faster application time to market and lower total cost of ownership. Headquartered in Marlboro, Mass., Egenera has offices worldwide. For more information visit www.egenera.com, call 508-858-2600 or send email to [e-mail].

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