Press Release

Virtual Instruments Kicks Off EMEA Channel Expansion and Signs Virtue

Virtualisation specialist to take Virtual Instruments' SAN optimisation solutions to French market

London, UK, 26th October 2010 – Virtual Instruments, a leader in storage area network (SAN) and virtual infrastructure optimisation solutions, today 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 the only value added distributor to offer 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.”

To find out more about Virtual Instruments’ partner programme or to sign up, please visit http://www.virtualinstruments.com/becomeapartner.html.

About Virtual Instruments

Virtual Instruments offers the award-winning VirtualWisdom virtual infrastructure optimisation solution that provides deep monitoring and analysis of how the virtualised IT infrastructure and the SAN affect business-critical application performance. Customers such as Barclay’s Card Services, Kaiser Permanente and Unilever achieve significant cost savings in virtualisation and SAN deployments by optimising utilisation, performance and availability of IT resources. Leading system and storage vendors including IBM, HP, HDS, Dell and EMC leverage Virtual Instruments to design and optimise SAN solutions for enterprise customers. The company was founded in June 2008 via a spin-out from Finisar Corp.; it has headquarters in Scotts Valley, Calif., and can be found online athttp://www.virtualinstruments.com.

For further information:
Federica Monsone/Sarrah Mason
A3 Communications
fred.monsone@a3communications.co.uk
sarrah.mason@a3communications.co.uk
+44 (0) 1252 875 203