Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software, and Avnet Technology Solutions, a value-added distributor of enterprise computing products, today announced the expansion of their European distribution partnership. The agreement expands the availability of Virtual Iron’s software solutions through Avnet to Austria, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, France, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Russia, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Ukraine. Avnet has been promoting and selling Virtual Iron in Belgium, Germany and Italy since June 2007.

“Virtual Iron has been a big success for us,” said Jan-Peter Koopman, managing director for Seceidos, an existing Virtual Iron channel reseller in Germany. “The product offers comprehensive, enterprise-class capabilities that are both easy to use and easy to afford. This opens up a much broader segment of the market to the benefits of server virtualization while also fully leveraging our infrastructure planning and management expertise.”

“The market for virtualization is expanding rapidly across Europe and our channel partners are looking for solutions that create new opportunities and enable their value-added services,” said Sukh Rayat, vice president for EMEA sales at Avnet Technology Solutions. “Virtual Iron has differentiated itself from other solutions with very comprehensive capabilities in the industry’s easiest-to-use package. The product is well-suited to address a wide variety of data center initiatives and opens up a whole new market segment for our channel partners.”

Virtual Iron has adopted a 100% channel distribution strategy that maximizes both product and services opportunities for its partners. This affords value-added resellers the opportunity to deliver complete solutions to their customers that include servers, SAN, storage, software and professional services. Some of the typical reseller partner services and consulting engagements driven by Virtual Iron include data center assessments, physical to virtual migration, business continuity and disaster recovery planning, capacity planning and utilization, implementation and deployment, policy-based automation development and various managed services.

The server virtualization market is growing at 60% per year according to IDC, but user adoption, only at 6% today, has been hindered by the high price and complexity of established commercial solutions. Virtual Iron addresses this gap by providing customer–proven, enterprise server virtualization capabilities that are both easy to use and affordable. The platform combines the Xen® open source hypervisor with robust virtualization services, policy-based management and transparent workload migration capabilities. The software also takes full advantage of new hardware–assisted virtualization (Intel VT and AMD-V) on servers to deliver near native performance. Unlike other virtualization solutions, Virtual Iron requires no installation or management of software on physical servers, further simplifying deployment and data center operations. Users leverage Virtual Iron to support a broad range of data center initiatives including server consolidation, development and test optimization, high availability, disaster recovery, capacity management and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

“Demand in Europe is very strong for our server virtualization solutions. The market’s clearly looking for an alternative and our combination of enterprise-class capability and ease of use is meeting a real need,” said John McCarthy, senior vice president of sales for Virtual Iron. “Avnet has been instrumental in establishing our presence in Europe and we’re looking forward to working with them to build out our channel network to further capitalize on this huge opportunity.”