Avnet Technology Solutions has inked a deal to add Double-Take Software's virtualization software to its linecard, offering VARs new tools to meet their customers' virtualization needs and expanding Double-Take's reach in the channel.

Double-Take Software's flagship product is its self-branded recoverability software, which offers data and system protection, high availability and disaster recovery capabilities, said Dan Jones, vice president of North American sales at Double-Take. Jones said that the Double-Take software can protect and recover a business's data and applications whether they exist physically or are virtualized.

"Virtual or physical it doesn't matter to us; we provide 'recoverability,'" said Jones, adding that the virtual area is really hot for his company.

Virtualization remains a hot area for VARs, not just those who can save their customers physical space and overhead costs by using virtualization to consolidate servers, but also those who can virtualize servers for failover and data backup to protect critical business data, the companies said. 

"Consolidation is a big spend area where virtualization has taken hold, but our partner community is also seeing growth in high availability, disaster recovery and business continuity as key areas customers are focusing on," said Tim FitzGerald, leader of Avnet's Virtualization and Consolidation Solutions Group. Double-Take fits right into that practice area and their focus dovetails with what Avnet is doing in the virtualization space, said FitzGerald.

"We can bring virtualization capabilities from a software perspective," Jones said. "We already have relationships with hardware and software vendors like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Citrix, Microsoft, VMware," Jones said, adding that Double-Take's software was a great complement to solutions built on these vendors' technology. 

Jones said the deal with Avnet will expand Double-Take's reach from its current base of about 500 channel partners to any partners selling, implementing and managing virtualization and server consolidation, disaster recovery and business continuity solutions to their customers.