Embotics Corporation, a pioneer in virtualization and automated cloud management, today announced the launch of a new joint service offering with virtualization specialists, Xtravirt, to help organizations optimize their virtual environments and reduce virtualization sprawl. The two firms will work together to deliver free health-checks to organizations to identify where virtual infrastructure is being underutilized or incorrectly provisioned. With Embotics vCommander providing cost-comparison for running different workloads on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 vs. VMware vSphere, organizations will be given advice around running multi-hypervisor environments. With this insight, Xtravirt will be able to advise businesses on how their virtualized environments can be optimized, with the potential to identify cost-savings of up to 50 percent.  Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can also use the joint service to prove their customers' cloud readiness and illustrate the benefits and cost-savings of moving on-premise IT to a managed virtual data centre.

"Despite the widespread awareness of virtual sprawl amongst the heads of IT departments, it still continues to pose a significant management overhead and cost burden," said Mark Barrett, VP Sales & Alliances, Xtravirt. "Gartner recently hit the nail on the head when it identified that companies need tools to help them with these challenges. By teaming-up with Embotics, we are now able to demonstrate to businesses the actual cost-saving they can achieve before they've incurred any expense. This win-win scenario, where we can contrast the costs against accurately projected efficiency gains, demonstrates how virtual data center optimization can, in effect, pay for itself."

Embotics vCommander provides a 360-degree view of virtual and private cloud environments, helping businesses to identify inefficiencies in their virtual data centres; eliminating virtual server sprawl, ensuring operational efficiency and thereby delivering cost and resource savings.  With support for Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as VMware vSphere environments, Embotics vCommander can provide businesses with a real-world cost and performance comparison, enabling them to identify which services should be deployed on which hypervisors for the best value. Specializing in virtualization, one of Xtravirt's focuses is identifying where end-user costs can be reduced, improving value and enhancing the user experience for its customers; aligning it perfectly with the capabilities of Embotics vCommander.

"The combined virtualization management capabilities of Embotics vCommander and services expertise of Xtravirt is the perfect match for tackling the burdens of wasted virtual infrastructure," said Colin Wright, vice president EMEA, Embotics. "With Embotics, it's easy enough to optimize a virtual infrastructure and automate management processes, but businesses need to be careful they don't fall back into bad habits further down the line. They need to make sure that virtual estates are well managed and the costs remain under control as their business continues to grow. It's not just a case of reducing costs though; it's now fairly common for IT services and infrastructure to be deployed across multiple hypervisors. As a result, businesses now need to consider which services should be deployed on which machines to ensure the environment is optimized for the workload as well as the cost. It's here that Xtravirt's expertise is indispensable in helping businesses to implement enterprise-wide best practice and standardization."