Virtual Iron and Promark announced a new distribution partnership. Promark will distribute Virtual Iron's software solutions to value-added resellers (VARs) in the commercial and government markets and give VARs access to its General Services Administration (GSA) contract. Unlike other contract holders, Promark is able to authorize resellers to sell to the government off of its GSA contract, making it easier than ever for Virtual Iron VARs to do business with federal, state and local government agencies.

Industry experts expect server virtualization software sales to grow as high as to $7 billion in 2011. Current penetration of virtualization on installed x86 servers is estimated at just 6-8% today as user adoption has been hindered by the complexity and high price of established commercial solutions. This is especially true in small and medium-size enterprises and government agencies where budgets and resources are limited. By delivering comprehensive, easy-to-use and easy-to-afford capabilities, Virtual Iron is addressing a huge gap in the server virtualization market and has positioned itself as one of 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.

"We are very excited about working with Virtual Iron to enable our channel customers to expand their server virtualization sales in the mainstream market," said Todd Hartung, vice president at Promark Technology. "Virtual Iron is very complementary to our other infrastructure offerings and together, they enable our business partners to quickly deliver complete solutions to this market."

Promark distributes a number of complementary infrastructure solutions including offerings from LeftHand Networks, Dell/EqualLogic, Falconstor, and QLogic.

"Virtual Iron fills a big gap in the server virtualization market," said Keith Groom, Solutions Group Director, Infrastructure & Client Computing at Softchoice Corporation, a Virtual Iron reseller and Promark customer. "The product offers comprehensive, enterprise-class capabilities that are both easy to use and easy to afford. This opens up a much broader segment of the market to the benefits of server virtualization while also fully leveraging our expertise in storage and other IT infrastructure technologies."

"LeftHand Networks SANs support Virtual Iron, and together create a powerful end-to-end virtualization and storage capability for customers," said Karl Chen, Vice President, Business Development and Alliances, LeftHand Networks. "By deploying the solutions together, our distributor and channel partners provide end-users with complete virtual infrastructure solutions that are cost-effective and reduce data center complexity."

Virtual Iron has adopted a 100 percent channel distribution strategy that maximizes 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.

"Both commercial enterprises and government agencies are rapidly adopting the Virtual Iron platform to consolidate their physical server footprint, reduce power and cooling requirements, maximize resource utilization, and deploy more cost-effective business continuity," said John McCarthy, Senior Vice President of Sales at Virtual Iron. "There is tremendous demand in the market for an alternative to VMware, and our combination of comprehensive capabilities, ease of use and affordability is meeting a real need. Promark will be instrumental in helping expand our presence in the market."