PGA TOUR Superstore Drives Improved Data Center Productivity with Virtual Iron's Server Virtualization and Management Platform
One of the Nation’s Fastest Growing Golf and Tennis Retailers Turns to Virtual Iron to Support Dramatic Growth and Maximize Data Center Performance and Reliability
Lowell, MA, March 5, 2007 – Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of enterprise-class software solutions for server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management, today announced that PGA TOUR Superstore (PGATSS), one of the nation’s fastest growing retailers for the golf and tennis lifestyle, has selected Virtual Iron’s virtualization and management software to help reduce data center complexity and cost. The company, which currently has eight, 70,000 square foot retail stores, selected Virtual Iron as part of a larger data center restructuring which also includes HP's c-Class blades and a Compellent Storage Area Network (SAN) that supports both Fibre Channel and iSCSI. As a result of both initiatives, PGATSS will significantly improve data center efficiency and performance while improving service levels for its in-store and online customers.
PGATSS was seeking a cost-effective solution that would enable it to virtualize both its internal and Website servers in order to support the company’s tremendous growth and expanding online presence. After an exhaustive evaluation of server virtualization vendors, PGATSS selected Virtual Iron in large part due to its outstanding performance in helping to enhance data center efficiency and its comprehensive virtualization and management solution built on top of an open source hypervisor foundation. PGATSS was also impressed that the new Virtual Iron 3.5 platform provided comparable capabilities to VMware at just one-fifth the cost.
“After evaluating the features, functionality and pricing of virtualization products from other major virtualization vendors, Virtual Iron was an easy choice,” said Gentry Ganote, CIO of Golf and Tennis Pro Shop, Inc. which owns PGATSS. “Virtual Iron’s outstanding support team, which was another key factor in our selection, was great during both our evaluation period and our implementation. I can heartily recommend Virtual Iron as the platform of choice for delivering advanced capabilities for virtualizing large server environments.”
Indusry experts believe that the next wave of virtualization solutions have the potential to deliver on the full promise of server virtualization and support advanced use cases including high availability/ disaster recovery and utility computing. These use cases are enabled by advanced, transparent workload migration and virtual server management capabilities.
With Version 3.5, Virtual Iron has made these enterprise-class capabilities easier to use for the mainstream market by providing support for simpler and more cost-effective iSCSI-based shared storage. This will facilitate the broad adoption of Virtual Iron’s virtual infrastructure management capabilities including LiveMigration, LiveRecovery, LiveCapacity and LiveMaintenance. Users can try Virtual Iron 3.5, which is generally available now, for free simply by downloading it at http://www.virtualiron.com/free.
“Our primary objectives were to virtualize our environment while taking advantage of the new Intel VT technology on our HP blade servers without any disruption to our customers,” said Ganote. “With Virtual Iron, the performance of the virtual machines is outstanding and everything integrated seamlessly with our blades and fibre channel SAN. As a fast growing company, cost was a major concern. With the addition of iSCSI support in Version 3.5, we can now leverage our SAN more cost effectively, implementing less expensive virtual nodes without the need for fibre channel HBAs. Virtualization simplifies your infrastructure, but it is still a complex technology. We can now easily manage our servers from the Virtual Iron Virtualization Manager console, and provide a level of reliability and ease of deployment previously not available from our ‘physical’ server environment. We are extremely pleased with the Virtual Iron platform.”
PGATSS also expects to benefit from Virtual Iron’s other enterprise-class capabilities such as large memory support (up to 96 GB), large SMP capabilities (up to 8 CPUs simultaneously) and the ability to virtualize server platforms with up to 32 physical CPUs. The software takes full advantage of new hardware–assisted capabilities from AMD (AMD-V®) and Intel (Intel® VT) to deliver near native performance and simultaneous support for 32 and 64-bit unmodified Linux and Windows operating systems. It also delivers sophisticated virtual management and policy-based automation capabilities. Virtual Iron requires no installation or management of software on physical servers, further simplifying installation and data center operations for PGTSS.
“PGA TOUR Superstore’s implementation of Virtual Iron 3.5 is indicative of its drive to leverage the most comprehensive virtualization and management capabilities to improve operational efficiency and productivity,” said Mike Grandinetti, Chief Marketing Officer at Virtual Iron Software. “With Version 3.5, PGATSS will be able to take advantage of the industry’s best enterprise-class capabilities and performance available at just one fifth the cost of the competition. We are pleased to welcome them to our rapidly expanding family of customers.”
About PGA TOUR Superstore
The PGA TOUR Superstore is one of the nation’s fastest growing golf and tennis retailers and partner with the PGA TOUR. For more information please visit http://www.pgatoursuperstore.com.
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 http://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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