Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), the leading provider of server virtualization software for small and medium-sized enterprises, today announced full qualification across Quantum’s DXi™-Series disk backup family of de-duplication and replication solutions and its Scalar^® line of intelligent tape libraries. When combined, these offerings enable customers to deploy very scalable, highly available and cost-effective virtualization and data protection solutions for business critical systems. The announcement coincides with the recent general availability release of the DXi7500, Quantum’s flagship disk backup system.

Organizations are increasingly implementing virtualization technologies to consolidate their physical infrastructure and reduce expenses. Customers also utilize virtualization to relocate workloads between physical resources, enabling additional benefits such as enhanced business continuity. But to build a complete business continuance strategy requires high availability, fast recoverability and long term disaster recovery and archiving.

“Today, virtual servers are increasingly being used for enabling high availability to address application disaster recovery and business continuance, in addition to reducing power, cooling, floor-space and environmental (PCFE) issues and costs,” said Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst, the StorageIO Group. “Virtualization software is being adopted for both consolidation and enabling transparent management of IT resources, especially benefiting SME customers who must stretch every IT dollar doing more with less. However, there are gaps in native data protection for virtual server environments requiring re-thinking of data protection strategies. Virtual Iron and Quantum are responding to this challenge utilizing their respective industry strengths helping their customers achieve more efficient and comprehensive data protection for virtual server environments.”

Virtual Iron provides comprehensive, easy-to-use server virtualization capabilities on an infrastructure-friendly architecture. The platform combines an open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and policy-based capabilities for intelligent failover and dynamic workload management. Quantum specializes in backup, recovery and archive, providing a comprehensive portfolio of integrated disk, tape, de-duplication and multi-site replication solutions under common management. When utilized together in customer environments, these solutions from Virtual Iron and Quantum enable users to minimize exposure to outages, reduce backup windows and capacity requirements and make reliable, long-term archiving possible without breaking budgets. These benefits provide immediate return on investment and improve business continuity.

“Virtualization is a powerful technology that is having a very positive impact on how IT organizations reduce their environmental footprint, but many customers continue to be challenged with architecting efficient and scalable enterprise-wide data protection and business continuity strategies to maximize their investments,” said Mark Eastman, director, solutions marketing for Quantum. “We are pleased to be working closely with Virtual Iron to assist customers in effectively matching virtualization techniques with the right combination of data protection solutions.”

“For Virtual Iron customers that want a powerful and cost-effective solution to safeguard their virtual infrastructure, Quantum’s DXi Series is a perfect choice,” said Chris Barclay, director of product management for Virtual Iron. “Together, the Virtual Iron and Quantum solutions are well-suited to implementing and protecting virtual environments. Users can achieve high availability as well as cost-effective data protection for their business critical systems and data.”

For more information about the joint solutions offered by Virtual Iron and Quantum, please visit Quantum’s vendor alliance page at: www.quantum.com/Partners/VendorAlliances/SystemPartners/Index.aspx

Virtual Iron’s vendor alliance page at: www.virtualiron.com/Partners/Technology-Partners/Quantum/index.php.