CDW Corporation, a leading provider of technology products and services to business, government and education, today announced a relationship with VMware that offers three new virtualization solutions to help customers maximize server utilization, improve disaster-recovery capabilities and reduce their carbon footprints.

“CDW has had great success helping our customers implement virtualization solutions within their data centers,” said Ken Grimsley, CDW vice president of strategic sales. “Doing so, we have detected growing demand for hosted and remote-management service offerings that provide organizations of any size the flexibility to scale their virtual resources quickly and cost effectively, and to reduce their environmental impact even further.”

CDW is working with VMware to offer several new VMware solutions:

• Hosted Enterprise Infrastructure (HEI) is an on-demand Infrastructure as a Service powered by VMware Infrastructure 3. The solution enables the ability to increase or decrease processing cycles during seasonal spikes, deploy minimal disaster-recovery footprints until recovery is necessary, and avoid one-time hardware and software charges. CDW customers are charged based on allocated infrastructure capacities of the central processing unit (CPU), memory and disk.
• Remote Managed Services (RMS) supports VMware environments located on user premises or other data center locations. CDW monitors VMware ESX hypervisor performance, utilization and system messages. The service includes proactive planning for software and hardware patches, as well as assistance with physical-to-virtual conversions, VMware ESX hypervisor optimization, load balancing and other administrative tasks.
• Remote Backup Services (RBS) uses industry-leading server and backup technologies to back up virtual machines to CDW enterprise hosting centers securely and efficiently. Combined with the CDW HEI, RBS enables customers to put together disaster-recovery solutions with minimal up-front costs and less than 24-hour recovery time and recovery point objectives.

“The CDW Hosted Enterprise Infrastructure has grown impressively for us over the last year,” said Grimsley. “Infrastructure as a Service is a key strategy for CDW, and VMware is integral to our offerings.”

“VMware applauds CDW’s commitment to providing innovative and valuable virtualization offerings for its customers,” said Steve Houck, vice president of Worldwide Channels at VMware. “Together, we’re helping customers consolidate their IT infrastructure resources, increase application availability, maximize storage efficiency and streamline maintenance.”

CDW experts are available to discuss these solutions at CDW’s booth (#1308) at VMworld 2008, held Sept. 16-18 in Las Vegas, or for more information, call 800-750-4CDW.