Virtue to Resell Virtual Instruments

Virtual Instruments announced the expansion of its EMEA channel plans and its partnership with Virtue, a Paris-based value added reseller and integrator of end-to-end virtualisation and storage solutions. This is the latest stage in Virtual Instruments’ growth strategy, one that has already helped the company sign a number of channel partners in North America and Asia, and that will see it recruit more across EMEA and worldwide.

Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom software allows IT administrators to monitor and analyse their storage and virtualised IT infrastructures in order to optimise their business-critical applications and productivity. To date customers include BarclayCard, Halifax Bank of Scotland and Unilever. Brocade, Dell, EMC, HP, HDS, and IBM are among the vendors who currently rely on Virtual Instruments to optimise and troubleshoot SAN implementations for their enterprise customers.

Virtue is a value added distributor that offers end-to-end virtualisation products and services in France, offering expertise around storage, backup, servers and applications and working with providers including Dell, FalconStor, HP and Pillar Data. By carrying Virtual Instruments’ solutions Virtue will address the need for Fibre Channel SANs and virtualised IT infrastructure managers to dramatically accelerate troubleshooting, improve application performance, eliminate downtime, accelerate virtualisation deployments, and improve server and SAN utilisation.

"A partner should have a deep understating of your technology and a strong knowledge of the local market; we chose Virtue because it has an undisputable expertise in storage and virtualisation and a brilliant track record selling to major French IT departments," said Justin May, EMEA sales director, Virtual Instruments. "In addition our technology complements Virtue’s existing storage product and service offerings making it even more appealing to customers."

"At a time when end users continue to purchase large amounts of capacity despite the availability of technologies such as thin provisioning and data deduplication, Virtual Instruments enables them to analyse how their storage and virtualisation infrastructures are performing. This helps maximise application performance and their existing resources to make better educated server, switch and storage purchasing decisions going forward," said Jean-Marie Nana, CTO and co-founder, Virtue. "We are looking forward to showing our customers how significantly we can help them improve the performance, availability and utilisation of their SANs and virtualised IT infrastructures."

Virtue will focus on large organisations in the financial, retail, insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, telecommunications and government spaces, and has already introduced Virtual Instruments’ solutions to multiple leading French IT organizations, including Groupama Asset Management.

"Although moving to a virtualised environment seemed like an easy decision on paper, our team had to consider how such an infrastructure would impact day-to-day activities," said Alain Boggero, IT manager, Groupama Asset Management. "Knowing the potential performance issues associated with a virtualised environment, our biggest concern has been visibility across the IT stack of our virtualised applications. Only Virtual Instruments’ VirtualWisdom is able to comprehensively monitor and measure SAN I/O traffic, helping us identify performance bottlenecks, and troubleshoot issues quickly and seamlessly across our virtualised environment."