Scalent Systems, the leading provider of server repurposing software for large data centers, and 3Leaf Systems, provider of next-generation virtualization solutions for enterprise data centers, today announced a relationship between the two companies that allows seamless interoperability between the Scalent V/OE software and 3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server in customers' heterogeneous IT environments. Together, the two enterprise-level solutions provide customers with guaranteed service levels (SLAs) and consistent connectivity between servers, networks, and storage even as servers are repurposed in real-time for planned business shifts or unplanned business continuity reasons.

Data center managers are increasingly looking to achieve greater management control, higher utilization and improved availability of server resources. Traditionally, server repurposing -- changing which servers are running, what software is running on them, and how they're connected to network and storage -- has been a time- and cost-prohibitive activity. With Scalent V/OE and the 3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server, server infrastructure repurposing can be achieved in minutes, without physical cable moves or resource reconfiguration, while maintaining service level agreements.

Scalent V/OE enables any managed server software stack to boot from and access specific SAN LUN segments from any physical or virtual machine -- on the fly, without requiring changes to underlying physical assets. The 3Leaf V-8000 virtualizes the I/O for large pools of servers, delivering limits and guarantees to both networking and storage interfaces, allowing service levels to be dynamically modified as application demand changes. This greatly improves resource utilization, and ensures priority applications are running efficiently at mainframe-class availability. The joint solution enables any server to take on the personality of any other machine at any time while maintaining consistent connectivity, and allows I/O resource allocation to scale as application requirements change. This ability to dynamically reuse, redeploy, and scale current IT assets delivers increased flexibility, lowers capital and management costs, reduces the need for infrastructure changes and improves system failover recovery, rollout and repurposing.

"By non-intrusively unshackling physical and virtual servers from their software stack, LAN and SAN dependencies, Scalent and 3Leaf enable data center owners to match their existing infrastructure to changing business needs in real-time, without disrupting application performance or business processes," said Ben Linder, chief executive officer of Scalent Systems. "We've seen remarkable total cost of ownership savings in deployed customer environments and we are excited to work with 3Leaf, whose architecture minimizes the cost of deploying commodity servers by removing the need for local storage and connectivity components while enhancing server availability and resiliency."

"3Leaf in collaboration with Scalent dramatically reduces the complexity of server movement in or across data centers, consolidating both storage and networking infrastructures while delivering guaranteed service levels and lowering costs," said Bob Quinn, chief executive officer of 3Leaf Systems. "Now every server can be deployed dynamically and inexpensively. The Scalent V/OE software and the 3Leaf server virtualization solutions are the right way to address asset utilization for maximum business benefit without changing existing infrastructures."

For more information, visit http://www.scalent.com or call 1-866-4-Scalent.