Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of server virtualization software for the mainstream market, today announced that its virtualization solution has now been deployed in over 2,000 customer organizations. The milestone, achieved in the first quarter of 2008, demonstrates the strong demand for comprehensive server virtualization capabilities in small and medium-sized enterprises. Virtual Iron offers comparable capabilities to VMware in a package that is much easier to deploy and easier to afford. Much of Virtual Iron’s growth has come from small and medium-sized enterprises, which make up about 70% of its customer base. In most cases, organizations in these segments do not have the budget or depth of IT resources to take on the expense and complexity of a VMware deployment.

Virtual Iron saw strong growth across multiple verticals in the first quarter including Banking, Construction, Education, Government, Healthcare, High Tech and Professional Services. A few of the customers completing deployments in the first quarter include, Emanuel County School District, Goodell DeVries Leech & Dann LLP, Northway Bank, North Berkshire Health, Oporto (Spain), Pawtucket School Department, University of Massachusetts Lowell and YuuZoo Pty Ltd. (Singapore)

“There is tremendous demand worldwide for an alternative server virtualization solution,” said Ed Walsh, president and CEO of Virtual Iron. “We offer all the capabilities of VMware without the cost and complexity. This combination is meeting a very real and fast-growing need in the mainstream market.”

Virtual Iron saw a number of other highlights in the first quarter:

• The company continued to grow its worldwide distribution network. It signed expanded distribution agreements in Europe and Asia-Pac with both Avnet and Tech Data Azlan and now has over 425 value-added resellers worldwide.
• Virtual Iron also announced new technology partnerships with FalconStor and StoreVault, expanding its ability to deliver production-class virtual infrastructure and provide comprehensive support for advanced virtualization use cases such as high availability, disaster recovery and dynamic capacity management.
• The company added former Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) senior analyst and consultant Tony Asaro as chief strategy officer. Asaro is focused on business strategy, ecosystem development, evangelism and education of Virtual Iron to the market.
• In January, Virtual Iron secured $20 million in new venture funding to accelerate product development and expand global sales, marketing and distribution efforts.
• In March, Virtual Iron was recognized as a Top 100 Northeast Company by Always On Network in recognition of its technology innovation, market momentum and market opportunity.
• In February, VAR Business magazine readers also recognized Virtual Iron as one of the leading alternative solution vendors to VMware for server virtualization.

Industry experts expect server virtualization software sales to grow as high as to $7 billion in 2011 from $800 million in 2006. Current penetration of virtualization on installed x86 servers is estimated at just 6% today as user adoption has been hindered by the complexity and high price of established commercial solutions. By delivering comprehensive, easy-to-use and easy-to-afford capabilities, Virtual Iron addresses a huge gap in the server virtualization market and has quickly positioned itself as the leading solution for the untapped mainstream market. The Virtual Iron platform combines an open source hypervisor with robust virtualization services, policy-based management and transparent workload migration capabilities. It also takes full advantage of new hardware–assisted virtualization on servers to deliver near native performance. 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).