Rapid Growth in Server Virtualization and Management Business Driven by Expanded Distribution Channel, Partner Ecosystem and Product Footprint
Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of software for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management, today announced that more than 750 organizations are using its enterprise-class solutions. The company's momentum in the first half of 2007, which includes significant growth in its distribution channels, partner ecosystem and product footprint is a direct result of growing demand from organizations looking for a cost-effective alternative to VMware.
While VMware has been on its own in the virtualization space for more than nine years, it's begun to share some of the spotlight with Virtual Iron. Turning the economics of virtualization upside down, Virtual Iron is delivering comparable capabilities and performance to VMware at just one-fifth the cost. As a result, Virtual Iron has quickly become "the VMware alternative" for a growing number of companies such as CaixaTerrassa, Charlotte Observer, City of Evanston, City of Gainesville, Hitachi, Lane Community College, Manz Automation, Meganet Communications, Office of the Attorney General of South Carolina, Owen-Bird Law, Parker-Hannifin, PGA TOUR Superstores, Priceline.com, Stanley Betting International, ServePath, Toshiba, Truck-Lite, Vita-Mix, Weiss and XCalibre Communications.
"Despite VMware's extraordinary success, the server virtualization market is still penetrated at less than 5 percent, largely due to the cost and complexity of their solutions," said John C. Thibault, president and CEO of Virtual Iron. "By removing these obstacles, Virtual Iron is bringing all the benefits of server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management to the mainstream market, including small and medium-sized businesses. The market opportunity is huge."
New Customer Gains
As of June 30th, there were more than 750 organizations using Virtual Iron's enterprise-class solutions. This includes more than 250 using Virtual Iron Enterprise Edition in multi-server environments (comparable to VMware's high-end offering) for server consolidation, rapid provisioning, business continuity, disaster recovery and capacity management; and more than 500 using Virtual Iron's Single Server Edition (comparable to XenSource's high-end offering) for server consolidation and rapid provisioning. Virtual Iron Enterprise Edition is one of only two products on the market today offering advanced features such as Live Migration and policy-based management capabilities such as Live Capacity, Live Maintenance and Live Recovery.
"Even if we had the money for VMware, I would still go with Virtual Iron," said Stephen Bakerman, IT Director at Owen-Bird, a law firm based in Vancouver, British Columbia. "Their support is phenomenal and their feature set is very competitive with VMware. It's going to go back and forth as far as which vendor has better features. For any organization looking for a virtualization solution that's simple to use and easy to get around with, Virtual Iron is the way to go."
"Virtual Iron is the first server virtualization platform that could satisfy our requirements and it is now turning our vision for a flexible and dynamic IT infrastructure into reality," said Tony Lucas, XCalibre Communications CEO. "We're able to deploy Virtual Iron across our entire ISP infrastructure to increase service levels for both our internal and external customers."
Distribution Channel Growth
Virtual Iron has adopted a 100 percent channel distribution strategy and expanded its distribution channels dramatically in the first half of 2007 including:
-- A U.S. distribution agreement with Tech Data expands the availability
of Virtual Iron's solutions to 200 - 300 highly qualified value-added
resellers in the U.S. Virtual Iron will be distributed through Tech Data's
Advanced Infrastructure Solutions (AIS) Division which combines a high-
touch, consultative sales approach with the distributor's extensive
technical expertise and broad product knowledge.
-- Four new distribution partners in Europe expand the availability of
Virtual Iron to more than 500 new reseller partners across Europe. The new
distributors include AppSpeed Distribution Ltd. in the United Kingdom;
Avnet in Belgium, Germany and Italy; Centia in France, Germany and The
Netherlands; and Trigono in Scandinavia.
-- Virtual Iron continues to enjoy a very productive relationship with
Nissho, IBM's largest reseller in Japan and has added five new distributors
in the Asia-Pac region.
-- Membership in the Intel Enabled Server Acceleration Alliance (ESSA)
certifies Virtual Iron's solution on Intel-based server platforms for
inclusion in pre-defined, ready-to-use solutions available to all Intel
ESSA OEM channel partners worldwide.
-- In conjunction with its participation in ESAA, Virtual Iron also
signed an OEM agreement with Arrow Electronics, Inc. (NYSE: ARW) where
Arrow North American Components will offer an integrated, Intel-based
"appliance" with Virtual Iron's software pre-installed on its white box
servers.
-- An agreement with HP's Software Licensing and Management Solution
(SLMS) Program. HP will resell Virtual Iron through its SLMS program to
its channel resellers and end-users as part of an extensive portfolio of
software offerings that include Adobe, Citrix, CA, Microsoft, Novell, Red
Hat, Oracle and many others.
"Virtual Iron and VMware are the only two companies that offer enterprise-class virtualization, and Virtual Iron's pricing is more compelling," said Aaron Schneider, director of solution engineering at channel reseller The Pinnacle Group, based in Carlsbad, Calif. "Virtual Iron's software license is currently about 20 percent of the cost of a VMware license. This helps position a customer's budget to be better-utilized in other areas needed to implement and support a virtualized computing environment."
"There is definitely strong demand for an alternative to VMware. Customers don't like paying high prices, and they don't like being limited in their options," said Dermot Reynolds, managing director at NewDatum, a U.K.-based virtualization consultancy. "There are currently some gaps in functionality in XenSource products that have been non-existent in Virtual Iron since day one. From a management and performance point of view, Virtual Iron has a pretty big lead."
Expanding Technology Partner Ecosystem
Virtual Iron also added a number of new technology partners in the first half of 2007, complementing existing relationships and agreements with AMD, Emulex, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, QLogic, SAP and Sun Microsystems.
-- HP ProLiant Partner Program - Virtual Iron became one of two charter
members of the invitation-only program, expanding its ability to deliver
advanced virtualization capabilities to the mainstream market.
-- IBM System Storage-Proven - This validation ensures users that Virtual
Iron's platform is optimized for IBM-based data centers. Virtual Iron is
also IBM Server-Proven.
-- Citrix - Virtual Iron completed integration with both the Citrix
Desktop Broker for Citrix Presentation Server(TM) and the Citrix Password
Manager(TM), creating an advanced desktop virtualization solution.
-- Compellent - By deploying Compellent virtualized storage with Virtual
Iron server virtualization technology, users gain a simple, flexible and
cost-effective virtualized infrastructure that easily adapts to changing
business requirements.
-- EqualLogic - Equallogic's PS Series storage arrays are now certified
for use with Virtual Iron. The combined solution delivers enterprise-class
server and storage virtualization capabilities and facilitates the
significant benefits of advanced virtual infrastructure management
capabilities such as LiveMigration, LiveRecovery, LiveCapacity and
LiveMaintenance.
-- rPath - Virtual Iron and rPath entered into a technology partnership
to facilitate application providers' ability to convert their applications
into ready-to-run virtual appliances. Application providers can now use
rBuilder Online to assemble community versions of virtual appliances that
run on the Virtual Iron platform.
Expanding Product Footprint
Virtual Iron offers a comprehensive software platform with production-ready server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management capabilities. The platform combines an open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and management including support for the industry's most innovative capabilities including Live Migration, Live Recovery, Live Capacity and Live Maintenance. Users are also able to take full advantage of new hardware-assisted virtualization (Intel VT and AMD-V) on servers to deliver near native performance. Virtual Iron continued to expand these capabilities in the first half of 2007 while streamlining implementation and deployment. Some of the major enhancements include:
-- New Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Solution - In April, Virtual
Iron and Provision Networks introduced a new bundled, server-hosted,
virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution to address the challenges of
managing, securing and maintaining today's Windows-based, enterprise
desktop infrastructure. The joint solution delivers all the benefits of
server virtualization to desktop infrastructure and provides the first
economically attractive alternative for desktop virtualization.
-- Support for Logical Disks - enables Virtual Iron users to take
advantage of all the performance and scalability benefits of raw SAN
storage with the optimal flexibility and ease of use of virtual disk
storage. As a result, users can consolidate storage and move it around
easily as they migrate workloads from one server to another using Virtual
Iron's virtual infrastructure management and Live Migration capabilities.
Virtual Iron is the first to offer this capability in a virtual
infrastructure environment.
-- VLAN Support - VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks) allow greater
server consolidation using fewer Network Interface Cards (NICs). As a
result, Virtual Iron users gain significant new reductions in hardware
costs, management complexity and maintenance and support costs in their
data centers.
-- iSCSI Support - With support for iSCSI, Virtual Iron provides for more
simple and cost-effective shared storage to facilitate the mainstream
adoption of virtual infrastructure management capabilities such as
LiveMigration, LiveRecovery, LiveCapacity and LiveMaintenance of virtual
servers.
About Virtual Iron Software, Inc. Virtual Iron provides enterprise-class software for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management at one-fifth the cost of comparable alternatives. Its solutions enable companies to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of managing and operating their data center. Virtual Iron delivers advanced virtualization capabilities that exploit industry standards, open source economics and built-in hardware-assisted acceleration. Large and mid-sized enterprises use the software for server consolidation; development and test environments; rapid provisioning; high availability and disaster recovery; capacity management; and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
The software is available for free download at http://www.virtualiron.com/free. The company is privately held and based in Lowell, Massachusetts. For more information, visit http://www.virtualiron.com or email info@virtualiron.com.
Contact:
Tim Walsh
Virtual Iron Software
978.849.1247
twalsh@virtualiron.com
Palmer Reuther
Racepoint Group for Virtual Iron
781.487.4606
preuther@racepointgroup.com
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