Egenera's foundational Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture, the SAN-like stuff that virtualizes network, storage and compute resources so applications and data services can be provisioned, managed, moved and scaled, has been patented. The US patent is number 7,231,430. Filed for in January 2002, it took the Patent and Trademark Office three-and-a-half years to send back its first comment. The company also got a patent on accessing Windows consoles in a virtualized environment, No. 7,228,265.