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VM6 Software Makes it Easy for SMBs

VM6 Software COO and founder Eric Courville has an impressive resume that includes stops at Embotics, where he was VP of worldwide sales and business development, and Platespin, where he was a founding employee in charge of establishing and executing their go-to-market strategy. The guy has gravitas, so when he invests his own money in a company--as he did with VM6--you know there is some serious potential waiting to be tapped.

It's taken a couple of incarnations, but now Courville and Co. are taking their best virtualization shot at the lucrative, ever-expanding SMB market with VM6 VMex 2.1, which aims to make life easier for small and mid-market companies by wrapping up virtualization, shared storage, advanced clustering and intuitive management and monitoring in one user-friendly package. No need to centralize infrastructure, bring in expensive experts, or integrate costly multi-point solutions for server and desktop virtualization, high availability, storage and management.

Now, rather than plunking down some $150,000 to get their virtualization infrastructures up and running--minus licensing costs--Courville say SMBs can realize a 70 percent lower TCO over three years by saying adios to the physical world.

In the way of high availability and storage recovery enhancement, VMex 2.1 includes a multi-array hub-witness that improves protection against unexpected crashes caused by power outage of entire sites. According to VM6, "This eliminates the need for manual intervention, which is required by competitive products to respond to certain crash scenarios."

The simplified event monitoring feature sends VMex 2.1 admins event monitoring via e-mail. "The configuration and management of alerts is now more integrated than in any other product on the market," the company claims.

The product's fully integrated dashboard contained in the storage virtualization manager provides "all the administrators need to understand the state of any storage virtualization object," and the management interface enables monitoring of VDI sessions via another fully integrated dashboard, allowing users to either view session state or reset sessions.

Worried about making the big leap to the virtual world? Courville says Microsoft Labs has VMex 2.1 and will be happy to demo it for prospective customers, adding, "Customers can start in a very non-obtrusive way in a test-dev environment." He also states that VM6 has 200 customers, no direct competition, and charges less than $1,000 for a low-end license.

"The biggest challenge we have now is getting known in the market," he concludes.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 06/15/2010 at 12:48 PM


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