Virtual Iron widens support with 2.0

Data-center virtualization and management startup Virtual Iron Software is expected to make the second release of its software, Virtual Iron 2.0, generally available Monday. The new version of the company’s software adds support for Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron chip and for IBM’s BladeCenter blade servers as well as expanding policy-based management capabilities, according to a Virtual Iron executive.

“This is about giving the customer what they’re asking for,” Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron, said in a phone interview Thursday. “There’s a significant demand for Opteron support.” The startup also plans to support AMD’s Pacifica virtualization technology due out in 2006 “some time next year,” he added.

In September, Virtual Iron announced it had signed a nonexclusive collaboration agreement with AMD’s bitter rival Intel. The startup has yet to formalize a similar relationship with AMD, but that is its hope, according to Grandinetti. “Exclusive relationships are a thing of a past,” he said. “Vendors need to work with both [Intel and AMD] to serve the needs of their customers. Several accounts we work with are running Intel Xeon servers side by side with [AMD’s] Opteron.”

In the blade arena, Virtual Iron also hopes to be agnostic and is already working with Hewlett-Packard, the other leading blade vendor apart from IBM, Grandinetti said. “We’re certainly getting closer [to a blade announcement with HP],” he added. The support for IBM’s BladeCenter includes taking some of Virtual Iron’s policy management and applying that to Big Blue’s blades to enable automated responses to system failures, according to Grandinetti.

Virtual Iron has moved quickly to invest in expanding its sales organization since gaining $8.5 million in Series C funding in September. The investment round was led by Intel’s venture capital arm, Intel Capital. Virtual Iron previously raised a total of $20 million in its Series A and B funding rounds in 2003 and 2004 respectively.

The startup has already opened three sales offices across the U.S., in Atlanta, New York, and Silicon Valley, with a fourth in Dallas set to open shortly, Grandinetti said. The company has also hired former VMware executive Evan Eckstein as its vice president of sales. Earlier this month, Virtual Iron moved into its new headquarters in Lowell, Massachusetts. It was previously based in Acton, Massachusetts.

Pricing-wise, Virtual Iron 2.0 like its predecessor VFe 1.0 will be based around the number of processor cores a customer has, Grandinetti said. The starting point is a maximum of 32 processor cores for the entire virtualization, management and policy engine software for $50,000. For customers using 64 or 128 processor cores, the cost for the Virtual Iron software runs at an average of $1,000 per processor, he added.

Grandinetti noted that the startup has done away with the first name for its software, the tongue-in-cheek VFe which used the periodic table nomenclature for the element iron — “Fe.” Going forward, VFe becomes Virtual Iron, so release 2.0 of the company’s software is Virtual Iron 2.0, not VFe 2.0, he said.