Lowell, Massachusetts - (The Hosting News) - December 20, 2006 - Server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management software solutions firm, Virtual Iron Software, has developed Version 3.1 of its virtualization platform with full support for both unmodified Windows and Linux.
According to the company, the release offers the first commercial alternative to VMware and targets mainstream user adoption for both enterprise
and small to medium business users. The company also announced the immediate availability of free, production-ready offerings of the software via download. This is the first time that a true enterprise-class virtualization solution with advanced management capabilities has been made available for free.
In separate announcements, Virtual Iron also highlighted two new customers, Mobius Management Systems and The Charlotte Observer, deploying Virtual Iron Version 3.1 to replace VMware.
Mitchell Gross, President and CEO of Mobius Management Systems, Inc., a global provider of enterprise archiving and records management software remarked, ”Application development and testing is one of our most important business processes. We must continually innovate to maintain our world-class capabilities. After a rigorous review of alternative offerings, we have chosen Virtual Iron to replace VMware for optimizing our software development, testing and staging processes. Virtual Iron’s advanced capabilities and attractive price/value position will enable us to reduce server procurement costs and related power and cooling expenses while improving our team’s productivity.”
Geoff Shorter, IT Infrastructure Manager, at The Charlotte Observer added, ”Virtualization has the potential to deliver huge advantages in data center cost savings and reduced complexity. However, cost-savings alone are not enough. Virtual Iron’s enterprise-class solution delivers this and more at less than 20 percent of the cost of alternative solutions.”
Additionally, the company believes that the benefits of server virtualization are compelling and well documented but, until now, the cost of proprietary solutions has prevented the broad-based deployment of virtualization. According to IDC, adoption of server virtualization is currently only 6 percent and the single biggest hurdle to future adoption is cost. The leading proprietary solutions today generally cost more than the price of an industry-standard server.
John Humphreys, Program Director of IDC’s Enterprise Virtualization program remarked, ”Server virtualization is quickly becoming a key area of investment for IT organizations worldwide. The clear return on investment combined with a broadening set of use cases has opened the door for mainstream customer adoption. As organizations look to invest in virtualization 2.0, there is a clear role for competition in the market. Virtual Iron is providing the advanced features and functions, including virtual infrastructure management, to meet customer requirements while lowering the barrier of cost.”
Steven Reed, CTO of virtualization solution provider and reseller Virtual Ngenuity commented, ”Virtual Ngenuity has seen explosive growth around virtualization, with the market more than doubling every quarter. Virtual Iron Version 3.1 enables us to revisit previously closed opportunities that were seeking more cost-effective virtualization options and at the time could not afford a VMware deployment. Virtual Iron also allows us to introduce new market segments to more cost-effective options for enterprise-class virtualization.”
Virtual Iron is targeting the price/value gap by bringing all the benefits of production-class virtualization to the mainstream market - from large enterprises to small and medium-sized businesses. Version 3.1 delivers comparable functionality to VMware’s most comprehensive offering for less than 20 percent of the price. The software is designed for all primary virtualization use cases including server consolidation, development/test/staging environments, the deployment of virtual appliances, rapid provisioning of virtual infrastructure, high availability/ business continuity and dynamic capacity management. Virtual Iron expects the new price point to remove a significant barrier to mainstream customer adoption.
To accelerate deployment of its software and make it as easy as possible for any user to compare Virtual Iron 3.1 to their existing solution, the company has made production-ready offerings of Version 3.1 available absolutely free. Users can choose from two different free offerings of Virtual Iron’s full-featured 3.1 Enterprise Edition software package:
1. Free Single-Server Virtualization and Management - Free Perpetual License up to 4 sockets, unlimited cores. Users can consolidate Linux and Windows virtual servers, run 32 or 64 bit workloads up to 8 CPUs each, create and deploy virtual appliances, and quickly and easily template and clone virtual servers. This is the only free enterprise-class offering that allows users to unlock the full capability of their server investment. 2. Free Multi-Server Virtual Infrastructure Management - Free 30-Day Evaluation License. Users get all the capabilities of the single-server offering above plus all of Virtual Iron’s advanced virtualization management and policy-based automation capabilities for use in an unlimited multi-server environment.
Virtual Iron is the only solution provider leveraging the open source hypervisor to provide a free enterprise-class version of the software to users.
Diane Bryant, Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Server Platforms Group offered, ”Virtual Iron’s open source economics combined with the industry leading price performance of the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5300 series now makes enterprise-class virtualization technology affordable to all customers. Intel is committed to working with Virtual Iron to develop virtualization solutions that address the most demanding customer requirements while maintaining the price/performance leadership that Intel customers have come to expect.”
John C. Thibault, President and CEO at Virtual Iron added, ”The cost of server virtualization should not exceed the price of an industry-standard server. We will drive broad adoption with an aggressively-priced solution that does not sacrifice the capabilities, performance and reliability required to deploy enterprise applications. Version 3.1 provides an enterprise-ready solution that enables the full benefits of server virtualization at a fraction of the cost. Virtual Iron is also the first and only company to fulfill the market promise of the open source hypervisor project.”
Version 3.1 endeavors to take full advantage of Virtual Iron’s existing capabilities including the open source hypervisor with unmodified guest operating support, large memory (up to 96 GB of RAM), and support for hundreds of virtual servers on a single machine. The platform provides fully integrated virtual infrastructure management and policy-based automation capabilities. Virtual Iron is the only virtualization platform that does not require manual installation or management of software on physical servers. This dramatically simplifies deployment, installations, data center operations and reduces costs.
Virtual Iron provides software solutions for creating and managing virtual infrastructure, with an eye toward enabling companies to dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of managing and operating their enterprise data center. Virtual Iron delivers advanced virtualization capabilities that exploit industry standards, open source economics and built-in hardware-assisted acceleration. Organizations use Virtual Iron’s software for consolidation, rapid provisioning, business continuity, capacity management and policy-based automation to deliver significant improvements in utilization, manageability and agility. Virtual Iron is privately held and based in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Tom Bittman, VP and Distinguished Analyst added, ”The software partitioning market for Intel servers is maturing and becoming more competitive. The price for virtualization software will drop.”
Mike Smith, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing of Emulex remarked, ”Emulex is working closely with Virtual Iron to further expand the adoption of server virtualization within the enterprise data center. Our joint collaborations simplify storage administration and lower cost of ownership for our mutual customers, while ensuring SAN management best practices, such as zoning and LUN mapping, through the deployment of enterprise-class Emulex LightPulse Virtual HBAs.”
Margaret Lewis, Director, Commercial Solutions at AMD offered, ”We believe the AMD Opteron(TM) processor has made significant strides in advancing performance-per-watt and x86 virtualization leadership, thereby greatly enhancing the flexibility, scalability and compelling economics of hardware virtualization. Virtual Iron’s technology represents a natural and valuable extension of these benefits for users deploying enterprise-class virtualization applications.”
Andy Conoops, Operations Director of The Virtualization Academy (vacademy) opined, ”As virtualization technology expands its reach into every type of organization, from the smallest businesses to the largest enterprises, companies are positioning themselves to realize the well-documented benefits of virtualization. As a global independent virtualization specialist, the vacademy welcomes the launch of Virtual Iron’s latest release of its server virtualization and management product. It is positioned to bring highly capable and affordable server virtualization solution to the mainstream market, in turn giving users a greater choice.”
Frank Berry, Vice President of Marketing of QLogic Corp. added, ”QLogic customers in Global 2000 corporations are consolidating Linux and Windows infrastructure for better utilization. With support for popular Windows Server 2003, SANbox switches, and SANblade HBAs, Virtual Iron 3.1 allows customers to consolidate Linux and Windows server and SAN infrastructure quickly and cost effectively.”
Zoran Jovanovic, Founder of Austria-based Prosper Intelligence GmbH offered, ”Virtual Iron helps differentiate our offerings with an excellent virtualization solution that is priced at less than 20% of the cost of VMware. In addition, Virtual Iron will offer a growing marketing opportunity for all channel partners with no channel conflict.”
George Weiss, VP and Distinguished Analyst of Gartner IT Symposium Presentation - Windows vs. Linux vs. Everything Else added, ”Virtualization integration and support services will be delivered by key vendors, including IBM, HP and Microsoft, with packaging and services for Linux by Red Hat and Novell and automation tools by third party solution suppliers, e.g. Virtual Iron.”
Stephen Pollack, CEO of PlateSpin Ltd. commented, ”PlateSpin’s broad multi-platform support for today’s leading virtualization platforms provides flexibility and customer choice in enterprise virtualization solutions. Utilizing new capabilities in Virtual Iron 3.1, PlateSpin PowerRecon and PowerConvert help customers comprehensively analyze and optimize their data center infrastructure, providing operational advantages and capital expense reduction.”
Julian Box, Managing Director of VirtualizeIT concluded, ”As one of the UK’s leading data center virtualization specialists, we are pleased to be a launch partner for Virtual Iron. This new and highly capable product set broadens the choice for end users in the server virtualization space.”
At $499 per socket on a perpetual license basis, Virtual Iron offers comparable capabilities to VMware’s most comprehensive offering, for less than 20 percent of the cost.
To learn more about the offering, please visit: http://virtualiron.com/free.
For more information about Virtual Iron, please visit: www.virtualiron.com.
Observe website hosting reseller offers, managed server and dedicated server hosting resources and research.
Posted on Wednesday, December 20 @ 09:47:15 EST by editor
Related Articles
No user responded in this post