Delving deeper into the small to medium-sized business (SMB) market space, Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq: JAVA)announced it has expanded its virtualization solution portfolio that combines its x64 servers with VMware and Microsoft software.
Rob Adley, vice-president of systems practice for Sun Canada, says the announcement was made to highlight the company’s ongoing work in the virtualization space with both Microsoft and VMware.
“We’re offering support on (our) different products for VMware and Microsoft (software),” Adley said. “In data centres today, customers are asking for help in reducing their power consumption, floor space and in simplifying their management requirements. Our solutions consolidate the footprint in the data centre and also simplifies the environment.”
The new Sun virtualization solutions for SMBs combine the company’s Sun Fire X4150, X4250, X4450 servers and Sun Storage 7210 unified storage systems with VMware’s ESX product. In addition, the Sun Fire X4250 server and Sun Storage J4200 systems also have the ability to work with Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution to bring a better virtualization experience to end-users.
Sun’s goal is to reach out to its existing x64 customers, as well as new ones, such as smaller shops in this space, Adley said. What a lot of businesses don’t realize is that Sun’s hardware can enable them to run things such as Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as multiple operating systems such as Solaris and Linux too, he adds.
With Sun’s SMB virtualization solutions, Adley said customers will be better able to leverage their existing resources while also working to consolidate whatever’s necessary in the data centre.
“The benefits to our customers will be with things such as less power and cooling costs, more efficiency with servers and a (smaller) footprint in the data centre,” he said. “With the current economic environment, customers are being more careful in how they spending money, but the bundled solutions we have will make it easy for customers to adopt these solutions with the aid of our channel.”
To better prepare partners with its SMB virtualization solution portfolio, Adley says training, resources and various incentives are available to its channel. These incentives include various training credits, front-end and back-end rebates, as well as promotional spiffs.
Adley would not comment on the types of margins partners can receive on these solutions due to corporate policy, however, he did say partners can increase their revenue streams by doing what they’ve always been doing, attaching services and consulting to the sale.
“Partners are not just limited to selling servers and software,” he says, “services and consulting are also a part of the larger picture as well. When times are tough like this, it’s a great time to understand how (partners) can understand how they can consolidate or deploy (solutions) quicker to their customer base by using technology.”
