Virtual Iron announced a new European distribution agreement with IT products distributor Tech Data/Azlan. The agreement expands Virtual Iron's existing European channel and makes its solutions available to a highly qualified group of value-added resellers in France, Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. It also opens up the server virtualization market in Europe by making an easy-to-use and easy-to-afford enterprise-class alternative broadly available to end-users.

Virtual Iron will be distributed through Tech Data/Azlan This division combines a high-touch, consultative sales approach with extensive technical expertise and broad product knowledge to help value-added resellers capitalize on the demand for mid-market and enterprise-level server, storage and software solutions. With Virtual Iron, Tech Data/Azlan will provide a consultative solutions selling approach and target qualified value-added resellers focused on the latest enterprise server, storage and other data center infrastructure solutions.

"By reducing the complexity of production-ready server virtualization, Virtual Iron and its distributor and reseller partners are driving mainstream adoption of the technology," said John McCarthy, senior vice president of sales for Virtual Iron. "Tech Data/Azlan has a very strong presence in France, Iberia, Scandinavia and the U.K. and brings deep expertise in virtualization and IT infrastructure management."

"Server virtualization enables our value-added resellers to present their end-user customers with a compelling solution that can cut costs and streamline many data center operations," said Markus Bauer, director of virtualization at Tech Data Europe. "The addition of Virtual Iron strengthens our server virtualization offering and provides our value-added resellers greater flexibility when developing the latest data center solutions."

The server virtualization market is growing at 60% per year according to IDC, but user adoption, only at 6% today, has been hindered by the high price and complexity of established commercial solutions. Virtual Iron addresses this gap by providing customer-proven, enterprise server virtualization capabilities that are both easy to use and afford. The platform combines the Xen(R) open source hypervisor with robust virtualization services, policy-based management and transparent workload migration capabilities. The software also takes full advantage of new hardware-assisted virtualization (Intel VT and AMD-V) on servers to deliver near native performance. Unlike other virtualization solutions, Virtual Iron requires no installation or management of software on physical servers, further simplifying deployment and data center operations. Users leverage Virtual Iron to support a broad range of data center initiatives including server consolidation, development and test optimization, high availability, disaster recovery, capacity management and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Virtual Iron has adopted a 100% channel distribution strategy that maximizes both product and services opportunities for its partners. This affords value-added resellers the opportunity to deliver complete solutions to their customers that include servers, SAN, storage, software and professional services. Some of the typical reseller partner services and consulting engagements driven by Virtual Iron include data center assessments, physical to virtual migration, business continuity and disaster recovery planning, capacity planning and utilization, implementation and deployment, policy-based automation development and various managed services.

• Virtual Iron Plans to Join Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program
• Virtualization Update: Virtual Iron Signs OEM Agreement with Dell
• Virtual Iron Expands Support for Business Continuity and Storage with Version 4.2 of Its Server Virtualization Platform
• Virtual Iron 4.2 Near
• Virtual Iron Raises $20 Million for Its Virtualization Technology