Tech Data Bundles Virtual Iron on HP and IBM X64 Servers

Published: October 16, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server hypervisor and management tool maker Virtual Iron will today announce that one of its key distribution partners, Tech Data, will be pre-installing and discounting a bundle of Virtual Iron's eponymous tools on X64-based servers from Hewlett-Packard and IBM, who also push a lot of physical server iron through the Tech Data channel.

Tech Data's Advanced Infrastructure Division, which feeds IT gear into a network of value-added resellers in the North American market, is bundling Virtual Iron 4.0, the newly updated stack of server virtualization tools from Virtual Iron, on the key X64 server products from HP and IBM. The machinery is being configured with Virtual Iron 4.0 Extended Enterprise Edition, the company's top-end product; this software has most of the features offered by VMware in its Infrastructure 3 stack and XenSource's XenEnterprise 4.0 product. Tech Data is offering the Virtual Iron software to end users at a 10 percent discount of they take it on a pair of prebundled machines, which saves everyone a lot of time and which positions the customer to take advantage of LiveMigration and other high availability software features. Tech Data also sells servers at a discount compared to HP and IBM list price as well.

In the HP line, the bundle is being offered by Tech Data on the ProLiant workhorses, which are the Xeon-based DL380 and the Opteron-based DL385. A pair of DL380s, each with two dual-core Xeon E5345 processors and 4 GB of main memory costs $10,447, including three years of onsite 24x7 support from HP and including $3,555 for the Virtual Iron software with one year of 24x7 platinum support. An "optional" Module Storage Array 500 disk array half loaded with SAS disks costs $6,139. A similarly configured DL385 with Opteron 2218 processors costs $10,643, with the Virtual Iron software costing the same amount and the disk "option" being the same. Tech Data is also offering the bundle on HP's new "Shorty" c3000 blade server chassis and on various Xeon and Opteron blade servers, which are a bit pricier. The blade configuration has expensive Fibre Channel SAN switches from Brocade Communications as well as a larger MSA 1000 disk array that has considerably more expensive support than the MSA 500 used in the rack configurations. With two BL465c blade servers using Opteron 2218 processors with 4 GB of memory, the whole shebang costs $32,234, with Virtual Iron accounting for $3,555 of that. With the Xeon-based BL460c blade, the price after discounts comes to $33,114--virtually the same. (That price does not include the "optional" disk arrays but does include the Brocade switches, which cost just under $12,000 for a pair.)

Tech Data is not offering Virtual Iron on a tower-based server from HP, but it is doing so on the IBM System x 3500 server, which gives IBM a leg up on HP in retail and financial services companies that plunk tower servers under desks all over their sites. Tech Data is preconfiguring Virtual Iron 4.0 on the x3500 using two quad-core Xeon E5335 processors; each server has 6 GB of main memory and no storage, and the total server cost is $13,843. It costs another $17,616 to add a DS3300 disk array and its useful software options for partitioning storage and flashcopying files. A pair of Xeon-based x3550 servers with two dual-core Xeon 5130 processors and 4 GB of memory each costs $12,396 with the Virtual Iron software installed, but not including the DS3300 array. A similar pair of System x 3655 servers using dual-core Opteron 2212 processors costs $13,123, again not including the DS3300 disk array. Because IBM is not yet shipping its BladeCenter S blade server for smaller businesses, Tech Data is not yet offering a configuration for Virtual Iron and blades. But it will eventually.

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