Virtual Iron, PlateSpin Team on Virtualization

Virtual Iron and PlateSpin are joining forces to help end users not only assess the best opportunities for virtualization in their data centers, but to make the deployment of virtualized environments faster and easier.

PlateSpins PowerConvert and PowerRecon software will support Virtual Irons data center virtualization and management platform. At the same time, starting next month, Virtual Iron, in every Consolidation and Enterprise edition license of its software, will include a free migration of PowerConvert. Additional migrations will be available through either Virtual Iron or PlateSpin.

Virtualization—the ability to run multiple workloads, applications and operating systems on a single piece of hardware—is gaining momentum as users see the benefits in terms of reduced real estate and power costs, greater system utilization, and easier manageability.

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The goal of the Virtual Iron-PlateSpin partnership is to give users first the tools to analyze what their current situation is and then an easy way to implement the virtualization technology they need, said Eric Courville, vice president of global alliances for PlateSpin, of Toronto.

"They can collect the data and analyze their servers and find the best candidates for consolidation," Courville said.

PlateSpins PowerRecon gives users the analytical tools needed to analyze their current data center setup and determine which servers can be phased out and which workloads can best be moved onto virtual machines. It collects such data as hardware, software and services inventory; workloads; and resource utilization. The combination with Virtual Irons technology enables users to easily migrate workloads, Courville said.

Through PowerConvert, users can automatically move workloads between physical and virtual servers.

The partnership gives Virtual Iron, of Lowell, Mass., more tools as it builds an enterprise virtualization platform to rival VMware, said Mike Grandinetti, the companys vice president and chief marketing officer.

A majority of Virtual Irons business comes from consolidation projects, Grandinetti said. The partnership "gives people a tool to evaluate as is and a tool for will be," he said.

The companies will demonstrate their technologies at the Intel Developer Forum Sept. 26-28 in San Francisco, and then sponsor a Webcast Oct. 18. Their bundled offerings will be available later in October.

Virtual Iron over the past year has aggressively partnered with major vendors, including Intel and Sun Microsystems. In addition, the company in April announced it was moving its technology off its proprietary hypervisor and onto the open-source virtualization technology Xen 3.0.

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