Virtual Iron and LeftHand Expanding Relationship

Virtual Iron Software, Inc. has expanded its business relationship with LeftHand Networks (to be acquired by HP) by joining LeftHand’s Technology Alliance Program. Together, the companies offer enterprise-class server and storage virtualization capabilities to the mainstream market and enable more users to take advantage of the significant benefits of virtual infrastructure management.

Virtual Iron provides a comprehensive, enterprise-class server virtualization and management platform without the cost and complexity of comparable alternatives. LeftHand Networks leads the iSCSI SAN market and its SAN solutions built with the SAN/iQ storage software enable an infrastructure that enhances storage utilization, data protection and virtualized server availability. The combined solutions offer customers highly available and completely scalable virtualized server and storage environments that provide immediate improvements in resource utilization, simplified patch management, back up and disaster recovery for more cost-effective capacity management.

According to Bruce Waslie, Senior Systems Engineer at Koch Logistics, a transportation logistics company, "Both Virtual Iron and LeftHand Networks offer packages at the right price-point and with the features and functionality of far more expensive options." Waslie continued, "We sought out technologies that were functional right out of the box, required little training, and offered high availability and resiliency. Both Virtual Iron and LeftHand Networks have proven invaluable to our business."

Combining Virtual Iron and LeftHand Networks within the LeftHand Technology Alliance Program delivers the following benefits to end-users and channel partners:

• Product Qualification and Certification. LeftHand Networks SANs are fully certified and supported on Virtual Iron’s server virtualization platform. The companies will continue to expand this effort to integrate new technologies and products to provide customers with more complete solutions.
• Customer Support. Both companies will establish processes for providing quality, responsive support to mutual customers.
• Cross Training. Virtual Iron support and field personnel will receive SAN/iQ training and already have access to LeftHand Networks SANs. LeftHand Networks’ personnel also have access to Virtual Iron’s server virtualization platform. The companies have many joint customers using the solutions successfully in combination today. This allows each company to more effectively consult with customers and maximize the benefits and ROI they achieve with the joint solutions.
• Collaborative Documentation. Together, the companies will expand their efforts on best practice guides and solution briefs to teach customers how to implement simple and effective virtual infrastructures with Virtual Iron and LeftHand Networks SANs.
• Go-To-Market Activities. LeftHand Networks and Virtual Iron have many common value-added resellers who have hands-on experience deploying the solutions together. In addition, the companies will conduct joint seminars and webinars, keeping customers updated on the latest technology, and informing them about emerging solutions that address their changing business needs.

Virtual Iron delivers comprehensive, easy-to-use and easy-to-afford server virtualization capabilities and has quickly positioned itself as the leading solution for the mainstream market. The company offers a true server virtualization solution that incorporates comprehensive and intelligent virtual infrastructure control with essential capabilities such as LiveMigrate for virtual server migration, LiveRecovery for disaster recovery and high availability, LiveCapacity for dynamic CPU resource load balancing, LiveMaintenance for offline server maintenance without downtime, and LivePower for automated power usage optimization. By deploying LeftHand Networks’ iSCSI SAN with Virtual Iron virtualization and management software, users gain a simple, flexible and cost-effective virtual server and storage infrastructure that easily adapts to changing business needs and delivers a number of powerful capabilities.

For example:

• Virtual Iron enables the provisioning of new virtual machines to meet increasing application demands in the data center or to create new environments for software development and testing. LeftHand Networks’ SANs support these capabilities by allowing users to clone storage volumes almost instantaneously and with minimal additional use of storage. This enables users to automatically allocate server and storage capacity to workloads as needed, without administrative intervention.
• Virtual Iron Live Migrate migrate running virtual machines with their operating systems and applications from one physical server to another with zero downtime and without complicated clustering environments. This allows users to balance workloads and perform server maintenance without affecting service levels. LeftHand Networks’ SANs offers similar storage functionality, allowing volumes to be moved from one storage system to another with zero downtime and without modifying the virtual environment.
• Virtual Iron LiveRecovery provides business continuity for all applications by automatically re-starting virtual machines affected by server failure without any downtime and without complicated clustering software. LeftHand Networks’ SANs allow organizations to distribute their storage networks so that access to the virtual machines’ storage volumes can continue uninterrupted even through the loss of an entire data center.

"LeftHand Networks’ SANs and Virtual Iron software create a powerful end-to-end virtualization solution that simplifies server and storage management, improves utilization and increases data center flexibility," said Karl Chen, vice president of alliances and business development for LeftHand Networks. "By continuing to extend the benefits of storage throughout the enterprise, LeftHand Networks is helping customers make significant reductions in hardware costs, data center complexity and administrative overhead."

"Together, Virtual Iron and LeftHand Networks deliver affordable, production-ready virtualization and management solutions to the mainstream market," said Chris Barclay, director of product management at Virtual Iron Software. "The flexible and open architecture of SAN/iQ software combined with Virtual Iron’s advanced virtual infrastructure management and live workload migration capabilities, enable businesses of all sizes to leverage the full power and ROI of virtual infrastructure management."