Small law firm gets big-time savings with emerging server virtualization and virtual infrastructure solution

Lowell, MA – December 17, 2007 – Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software, today announced that Owen Bird, a law firm in Vancouver, British Columbia, is deploying its virtualization solution across its Windows computing infrastructure. The firm expects significant benefit from the software, including reduction of its server environment by almost two thirds, streamlined management of its computing environment and easy provisioning and set-up of systems for new users.

“We tested out pretty much all of the virtualization offerings before settling on Virtual Iron,” said Stephen Bakerman, IT manager at Owen Bird. “Even if we had the money to go with VMware, I would still go with Virtual Iron. Their feature set is very competitive with VMware. The support is phenomenal and the technology capabilities continue to improve. If you’re looking for something that’s simple to use and easy to get around with, Virtual Iron is the way to go.”

Owen Bird currently supports about 90 users in a Windows-only environment. The firm is running a number of critical workloads in a virtual environment including its Blackberry enterprise server in full production, its complete training/test accounting package running on SQL server, and all of its production Terminal Servers, which are running 24/7. The firm is also building all its test servers on Virtual Iron. Owen Bird started the virtualization project with 18 servers and it expects to reduce that number to six using Virtual Iron. This will enable it to avoid buying five new high end servers, saving the firm an estimated $70,000 this year in hardware alone and roughly $30,000 per year thereafter. According to Bakerman, though, there were more savings than just hardware purchases this year.

“Without Virtual Iron, we would need to expand our server room,” he added. “The firm was running out of space and our power and cooling requirements were growing out of control. This alone would have cost the firm another $75,000 if we hadn’t virtualized our server environment.” The firm also expects significant operational benefits using Virtual Iron’s advanced virtual management capabilities. For example, Bakerman can now provision a new server in a virtual environment and have it up and running in minutes rather than the week or more it used to take to get a physical server up and running. The firm is also taking advantage of Virtual Iron’s high availability and disaster recovery capabilities using 'LiveMigration’ and ‘LiveCapacity’ for automatic failover and automated policy-based management. Eventually, Bakerman expects to virtualize the firm’s entire computing environment with Virtual Iron.

“Owen Bird’s deployment is another great example of mainstream users taking advantage of Virtual Iron’s advanced virtualization capabilities,” said Ed Walsh, president and CEO of Virtual Iron. “By removing the barriers of complexity and cost, we continue to enable more and more users to take advantage of all of the significant benefits of enterprise-class server virtualization.”

Virtual Iron combines the latest version of the Xen® open source hypervisor with advanced virtualization services and policy-based automation capabilities. It also includes an automated X2V conversion software solution that enables customers to easily migrate workloads (data, applications, and operating systems) across physical, virtual, blade and image-based infrastructures in any direction. Virtual Iron also takes full advantage of the latest hardware–assisted virtualization capabilities from AMD and Intel to deliver near native performance. The software offers large memory support (up to 128 GB), large SMP capabilities (up to 8 virtual CPUs) and the ability to virtualize server platforms with up to 32 physical CPUs. Unlike other virtualization solutions, Virtual Iron includes LiveProvisioning™, a “zero touch” automated deployment capability that eliminates the need for physical installation or management of virtualization software on virtualized physical servers.

About Virtual Iron Software, Inc.
Virtual Iron provides enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure software that helps reduce the cost and complexity of managing and operating the data center. The software is easy to use and easy to afford and includes advanced capabilities that leverage industry standards, open source economics and built-in hardware-assisted acceleration. Small, medium and large organizations worldwide use Virtual Iron for: production server consolidation; development and test optimization; cost-effective high availability and disaster recovery; dynamic capacity management; and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The software is available exclusively through Virtual Iron’s Channel One partner network. Evaluation copies are available for free download at http://www.virtualiron.com/free. For more information, visit http://www.virtualiron.com or email info@virtualiron.com.