KACE™, the leading systems management appliance company, today announced the industry’s first virtual appliances for systems management to run natively on VMware Infrastructure 3.
The Virtual KBOX family of appliances offer the industry an innovative new way to deploy and manage critical IT resources. KACE now enables organizations of all sizes the chance to benefit from the advantages of physical appliances but with the added scalability, affordability, ease-of-support, and maintenance of virtual solutions via the industry’s easiest-to-use, most comprehensive, and most affordable systems management and deployment solutions. The Virtual KBOX family of appliances, available now, supports management of physical and virtual machines across Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Solaris environments.
"Since inception, KACE has broken new ground in the area of purpose-built appliances for systems management," said Rob Meinhardt, co-founder and CEO of KACE. "So it's fitting now that we're first to market with best-in-class systems management appliances that are fully compatible with VMware Infrastructure. Unlike a generation of virtual appliances preceding it, the Virtual KBOX family provides a systems management and deployment solution that is fully integrated from a highly optimized and hardened operating system through an easy-to-use, Web-based application."
Virtualization is expanding rapidly and organizations are seeking new ways to leverage this technology. The Virtual KBOX family of appliances allows organizations to take advantage of the benefits of virtualization a powerful new way. The new appliances deliver the benefits of a hardware appliance – extremely fast deployment times, low costs, and extreme ease-of-use, while providing all the benefits of virtualization – improved resource utilization, reduced energy and cost savings, improved maintainability and support, and the ability to quickly scale.
“What KACE is doing with the delivery of the Virtual KBOX is a step ahead of the market,” said Rich Ptak, principal of Ptak, Noel and Associates LLC. “KACE’s deep experience as an appliance specialist is clearly evident. Therefore, they bring a level of maturity to virtualization appliances that have not yet been seen. KACE is making the right moves for both their customers and the company."
Unique benefits of the Virtual KBOX family of appliances include:
- Rapid provisioning – initial deployment of the Virtual KBOX appliances can be accomplished in hours, and additional instances can be provisioned in minutes;
- Ease-of use-and administration – all functions of the Virtual KBOX appliances can be accessed via an intuitive Web-based user interface;
- Secure – the Virtual KBOX appliances are hardened and built on a highly optimized operating system;
- Ease of support and maintenance – the Virtual KBOX appliances are self-healing, upgrades include all appliance components from OS through to the application layer;
- High-scalability and redundancy – the Virtual KBOX appliances can be easily scaled to match each organizations’ unique requirements and take advantage of VMware Infrastructure’s native capabilities for redundancy and failover.
“We selected the KBOX appliances primarily for its affordability, ease-of-use, and rich functionality,” said Christopher Blake, workstation administrator at Benchmark Group, an architectural and engineering design firm. “We’ve had tremendous success to date and have experienced unbelievable time and cost savings. We are looking into virtualization technologies to consolidate hardware resources, maximize IT performance and agility, and reduce energy, so it’s reassuring to know that KACE is a step ahead of us and has a powerful new solution to help us continue to take advantage of virtual technologies through a virtual appliance.”
KACE helps customers save time and money. Systems managers are often forced to wear many hats throughout the day to work on a myriad of IT functions. KACE helps consolidate these functions by providing a single appliance for all projects, while delivering easy-to-use, comprehensive systems management that is affordable. The KBOX family of appliances fulfills all of the systems management needs of a medium enterprise from initial computer deployment to ongoing management and retirement.