Betfair Chooses Egenera to Power Betting Exchange Staging Environment

MARLBORO, MA--(Marketwire - December 17, 2007) - Egenera Inc., the data center virtualization company, today announced that Betfair, the world's leading online betting exchange, has chosen the Egenera® BladeFrame® system and Egenera® vBlade™ software for its critical staging environment. Betfair is one of the fastest growing online businesses in the world with millions of end-user customers.

One of the key factors driving Betfair's success is its strong focus on offering users new products and enhanced functionality -- often times rolling out new services every week. Betfair employs a three-step development and quality assurance, staging, and production process to develop, test and deploy new functionality and services before they are made available on the Betfair Website. As a result of its rapid growth, Betfair needed a more efficient and agile pre-production staging environment that could scale to support more than three times the new offerings schedule of the previous 12 months.

"Whenever we launched a new product, we were adding more and more physical hardware into the staging environment. As our growth continued to accelerate, this practice threatened to create a significant bottleneck in our ability to get new products to our customers quickly -- which is at the heart of our competitive advantage. We knew there had to be a better way to increase our speed without adding more hardware and complexity," said Tony Rigby, information systems manager at Betfair. "At the end of the day, we couldn't find another solution that could do all the things that Egenera can do, from hardware consolidation to ease of use and agility."

Egenera systems are highly available, flexible platforms that eliminate the need to dedicate servers to applications. Instead, Egenera's data center virtualization architecture -- the patented Processing Area Network (PAN) -- replaces physical components with software, and automatically repurposes and reallocates servers and networks of servers on demand. Egenera software virtualizes compute, storage and networking resources that can be dynamically allocated as business requirements dictate, enabling customers to increase agility, decrease time to market, and reduce data center complexity.

Rigby continued, "Prior to Egenera, creating a staging environment for a new offering could take between two to three days. With Egenera, it only takes a few hours -- with the same number of technical staff and no additional hardware, connections, cooling requirements or floor space.

"We needed an architecture where we could push a button to create either complete replicas of the production Betfair environment or 10 mini replicas of the environment immediately. In addition, if we needed to destroy an environment because we were running out of resources, we needed to be able to save the configuration and bring it back when we were ready to use it again. The key Egenera differentiator is the ability to manage all our resources at the push of a button."

vBlade Software: Flexibility and Simplicity

Egenera vBlade software is an extension to Egenera® PAN Manager™ software, which together, provide an entirely new and simple way to manage both physical servers and virtual machines, while allowing the user to take advantage of the full range of PAN Manager's integrated virtualization services including N+1 automatic failover, resource pooling, N+1 disaster recovery, live migration and more.

"Physical servers don't allow you to move, manage and utilize all the resources available to you -- Egenera vBlade software allows you to do all that from one place," said Rigby. "Some of our applications are very heavy on memory requirements while others are heavy on CPU requirements. Without using vBlade software we would certainly have had to add hardware and resources to the environment, but vBlade allows us to accomplish everything we need with the same number of Egenera Processing Blades and staff."

vBlades are user-defined partitions of a physical blade, used to consolidate multiple virtual machines onto a single physical server. By integrating leading hypervisor technology directly into PAN Manager software, customers can easily allocate either a full blade or a partition of a blade based on the needs of the application. This approach eliminates the complexity of managing virtual machines and physical servers in different ways and eliminates the need to add another domain expert into the IT organization.

"The further we deploy Egenera into our environment, the more opportunity we see to expand in the future -- in all points of our development and our production environments, as well as with new projects such as disaster recovery and entering new geographical markets," concluded Rigby.

About Egenera, Inc.

Egenera is a global leader in delivering data center virtualization solutions that reduce costs and complexity for enterprises and public sector agencies worldwide. The Egenera BladeFrame system virtualizes the data center 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 Egenera to run their most critical 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 info@egenera.com.

Egenera, and Egenera stylized logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Egenera, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. The information in this document is subject to change without notice.

Contact Information: Press Contacts: Gillian Farquhar Egenera, Inc. 508-858-3262 gfarquhar@egenera.com