Virtual Iron Targets Higher Education Market with Enterprise-Class Performance and Open Source Economics
Price/Performance Leader Delivers Comprehensive Server Virtualization and Virtual Infrastructure Management at One-Fifth the Price of VMware
Lowell, MA, February 27, 2007 – Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management software solutions, today announced a new strategic initiative to deliver its enterprise-class virtualization platform to the higher education market. The company is leveraging its strong price/value equation and Linux performance to target higher education institutions whose virtualization efforts have been slowed by the high cost, complexity and performance of existing solutions like VMware.
The benefits of server virtualization are compelling and well documented but, until now, the cost of proprietary solutions has prevented the broad–based deployment of virtualization, particularly in segments like higher education which are price sensitive. Adoption of server virtualization is currently only 6 percent and the single biggest hurdle to future adoption is cost. The leading proprietary solutions today generally cost more than the price of an industry-standard server. Many users report that the premium they pay for VMware licenses and management tools negate the savings they gain from reduced hardware, power and cooling costs. This is an especially acute issue in higher education.
Linux operating systems are also very prevalent in higher education data centers. The poor performance of existing virtualization solutions like VMware on Linux has also been a barrier to adoption.
“Higher education organizations want to leverage the full capabilities of server virtualization, but cost remains a major hurdle,” said Mike Grandinetti, Chief Marketing Officer at Virtual Iron Software. "Our solution eliminates this obstacle by making advanced features and functions such as virtual infrastructure management affordable for all. The Virtual Iron platform is also particularly well designed for the types of workloads prevalent in higher education data centers - large I/O and memory-intensive applications, scientific and research computations, and large Linux workloads.”
The Virtual Iron platform provides enterprise-class capabilities for Linux and Windows at just $499 per socket - one-fifth the cost of VMware for comparable capabilities. Virtual Iron combines an open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and policy-based management. The platform supports 32 and 64-bit Linux and 32-bit Windows workloads and delivers all the capabilities and benefits of primary virtualization use cases including: server consolidation; development and test; rapid provisioning; high availability and disaster recovery; and capacity management.
About Virtual Iron Software, Inc.
Virtual Iron provides enterprise-class software for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management at one-fifth the cost of comparable alternatives. Its solutions enable companies to dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of managing and operating their data center. Virtual Iron delivers advanced virtualization capabilities that exploit industry standards, open source economics and built-in hardware-assisted acceleration. It is available for free download at www.virtualiron.com/Free. Organizations use Virtual Iron for server consolidation, rapid provisioning, business continuity, capacity management and policy-based automation to deliver significant improvements in utilization, manageability and agility. The company is privately held and based in Lowell, Massachusetts. For more information, visit http://www.virtualiron.com or email info@virtualiron.com.
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