Virtual Iron Software (
www.virtualiron.com), a provider of enterprise-class software solutions for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management, today announced that EqualLogic’s PS Series storage arrays are now certified for use with Virtual Iron virtualization and management software. The combined solution delivers enterprise-class server and storage virtualization capabilities to the mainstream market and enables more users to take advantage of the significant benefits of advanced virtual infrastructure management capabilities such as LiveMigration, LiveRecovery, LiveCapacity and LiveMaintenance of virtual servers.
“The combination of Virtual Iron and EqualLogic has allowed to us to develop a hosting infrastructure that is not only cost effective, but can scale easily on a just-in-time basis,” said Paul Lappas, vice president engineering at ServePath. “We can offer valuable services such as hardware fault-tolerance and on-demand infrastructure scaling for our customers at a cost that is significantly less than alternative solutions.”
“Our mid-market clients have been asking us for a virtual infrastructure and management solution that is simultaneously production capable and affordable while supporting advanced applications such as high availability, business continuity and utility computing; “ said Mitch Northcutt, president and CEO of national virtualization consultancy RapidApp. “This partnership between Virtual Iron and EqualLogic brings together two emerging innovators with a complementary and compelling value proposition for our client base.“
Virtual Iron provides an enterprise-class virtualization and virtual infrastructure management platform that supports Windows and Linux virtual servers. The software combines advanced virtualization and policy-based management capabilities to deliver the benefits of all primary virtualization use cases including server consolidation, development / test / staging environments, virtual appliances, business continuity and dynamic capacity management.
By deploying EqualLogic virtualized iSCSI SANs with Virtual Iron, users achieve a simple, flexible and cost-effective virtualized infrastructure that easily adapts to changing business requirements. An EqualLogic SAN provides simple storage consolidation, which enables a virtual infrastructure environment to increase storage utilization, enrich corporate data protection methods, facilitate disaster recovery and enhance virtualized server availability and workload migration. In addition, EqualLogic’s fully redundant infrastructure provides an easy-to-use and disaster-tolerant consolidated storage solution. The combined capabilities enable companies to apply virtualization more readily for cost-effective high availability, disaster recovery and capacity management.
"Customers have embraced the use of iSCSI SANs with server virtualization to reduce data center complexity and to increase IT flexibility," said John Joseph, vice president of marketing for EqualLogic, Inc. "EqualLogic’s PS Series SAN solution provides enterprise-class network storage that complements Virtual Iron's server virtualization for enterprise environments. With Virtual Iron's native iSCSI support, the benefits of server consolidation and automated capacity management are now in reach for a broader segment of the market."
According to Gartner, the cost advantage of the iSCSI network infrastructure is most pronounced in Windows and Linux environments where initiators are typically NICs with software implementation of the iSCSI protocol. Gartner estimates that revenue for iSCSI disk storage systems, including that attributable to unified storage, exceeded $200 million in 2005 and will nearly double each year during the next few years.
"Cost-effective and easy-to-deploy iSCSI–based networked storage unlocks the full power and true promise of virtual infrastructure. Combined with our advanced, transparent workload migration capabilities, such as LiveMigrate and LiveRecovery, it enables virtual servers to freely migrate to any physical server in the data center,” said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron Software. “Virtual Iron is pleased to partner with EqualLogic to deliver affordable enterprise-class virtualization and management solutions to the mainstream market.”