LOWELL, Mass., Dec. 4 -- Virtual Iron Software, a provider of enterprise-class software solutions for server virtualization, today announced that storage solutions from NetApp are now certified for Virtual Iron’s server virtualization software. The combined solution delivers enterprise-class server and storage virtualization capabilities to the mainstream market and simplifies disaster recovery, streamlines test and development environments, and optimizes system utilization enabling more users to take advantage of the significant benefits of virtual infrastructure.

“The combination of Virtual Iron and NetApp has delivered huge advantages to Meganet, both in hardware and operational cost savings and in streamlining the management of our data center infrastructure,” said Paul Joncas, president and co-founder of Meganet Communications Inc. “The efficiencies and advantages we gained translate directly into increased service levels and better performance for our customers. We can easily manage our servers and storage and we have achieved a level of cost savings, reliability and ease of deployment previously not available in our previous server environment.”

"Customers are embracing the combined use of storage and server virtualization to reduce datacenter complexity and to increase IT flexibility," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of solutions marketing at NetApp. "NetApp storage solutions for virtualized environments provide our joint customers the perfect complement to Virtual Iron's server virtualization for all sizes and types of data center environments. With Virtual Iron's native Fibre Channel and iSCSI support, the benefits of a virtualized server and storage environment are now available to a much broader segment of the market."

Virtual Iron provides easy-to-use, enterprise-class capabilities on a next-generation architecture, significantly reducing the obstacles to mainstream market adoption. The platform combines the latest version of the Xen open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and policy-based automation capabilities such as LiveMigrate, LiveRecovery and LiveCapacity. Virtual Iron also takes full advantage of the latest hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities from AMD and Intel to deliver near native performance. Users leverage Virtual Iron to support a broad range of data center initiatives including server consolidation, development and text optimization, high availability and disaster recovery, capacity management and server hosted virtual desktops (VDI).

By deploying NetApp storage solutions with Virtual Iron, users achieve a flexible, easy-to-use and easy to afford virtualized infrastructure that easily adapts to changing business requirements. NetApp provides simple storage consolidation, which enables customers to implement a virtual infrastructure environment to increase storage utilization, improve data protection, facilitate disaster recovery and enhance virtualized server availability and workload migration. In addition, NetApp provides an easy-to-use and disaster-tolerant storage solution, enabling customers to apply server virtualization more readily for cost-effective high availability and disaster recovery and to fully leverage Virtual Iron’s automated policy-based management capabilities.

"Cost-effective and easy-to-deploy storage solutions for virtualized environments unlock the full power and true promise of a virtual infrastructure,” said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron Software. “Combined with our transparent workload migration and policy-based automation capabilities, it enables virtual servers to freely migrate to any physical server in the datacenter. Virtual Iron is pleased to team with NetApp to deliver enterprise-class virtualization solutions to the mainstream market.”

About Network Appliance

Network Appliance is a leading provider of innovative data management solutions that simplify the complexities of storing, managing, protecting, and retaining enterprise data. Market leaders around the world choose NetApp to help them reduce cost, minimize risk, and adapt to change. For solutions that deliver unmatched simplicity and value, visit www.netapp.com.

About Virtual Iron Software Inc.

Virtual Iron provides enterprise-class server virtualization software solutions that are easy to use and easy to afford. The software enables organizations of all sizes to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of managing and operating their datacenters. The software includes advanced capabilities that leverage industry standards, open source economics and built-in hardware-assisted acceleration. Users leverage Virtual Iron to support a broad range of datacenter initiatives. Evaluation copies are available for free download at www.virtualiron.com/free. For more information, visit www.virtualiron.com.