InfoStor magazine and infostor.com this week announced a partnership with Virtual Strategy Magazine (VSM), a leading online publication dedicated to covering virtualization trends, technologies, and products.

The partnership is designed to leverage each organization's strengths, and exploit synergies among server, desktop, storage, and network virtualization.

"Virtualization is the hottest trend in IT today," says Dave Simpson, InfoStor's editor-in-chief. "The synergy between InfoStor and VSM is twofold: The implementation of virtual servers has profound implications for end users' storage implementation strategies and purchases, and, server virtualization and storage virtualization are converging."

According to market research firm IDC, the number of virtual servers deployed is expected to grow at a 41% CAGR, resulting in 8 million virtual servers implemented in 2010. And for every $1 spent of virtualization projects, $2.50 is spent on SAN-based storage to support them.

"The nexus of server virtualization and enterprise storage is arguably the single biggest virtualization adoption consideration," says Carryl Roy, VSM's senior editor. By leveraging VSM's server/desktop virtualization expertise and InfoStor's focus on storage, we will deliver the industry's most comprehensive server/desktop virtualization and storage knowledge base to our readers -- from the CIO perspective down to nitty-gritty implementation details."

The InfoStor-VSM partnership will initially entail content exchange, including timely news articles, features, interviews, tutorials, lab reviews, end-user case studies, blog links, podcasts, videos, webcasts, etc., and will eventually include micro sites. The two publications will also collaborate on end-user and VAR/integrator surveys and research focused on virtualization strategies and purchasing plans.