The increasing awareness of climate change and the impact of carbon emissions on natural resources and on customers' wallets have given VARs the opportunity to grow their own business while saving customers’ money and reducing energy consumption, according to Virtual Iron.

"Most businesses are profit-oriented first and socially oriented second,” said Virtual Iron Chief Marketing Officer Mike Grandinetti.  “But the beauty of green is you don't have to give up one at the expense of the other. VARs can save customers money, make their own company money and make the planet a much better place at the same time.”

Grandinetti said whether the green label is applied to it or not, customers have struggled with server sprawl, physical space issues and rising energy costs.  Adding to those problems, many end-user customers are faced with aging hardware that eats power and generates an incredible amount of heat, and underutilized servers that waste costly energy.

Virtual Iron VARs are using virtualization to increase customers' server utilization rates to as much as 80 percent and can reduce customers' physical server numbers by one-third to one half, he said.  Also, because the technology has relevant benefits for customers of any size and in most horizontal and vertical markets, "every VAR has the ability to make this issue relevant for almost all of their customers."

Grandinetti said for VARs, it's no longer such a struggle to impart the value proposition of virtualization and server consolidation solutions.  The technology and its benefits are well-known, thanks to virtualization pioneers such as VMware, he said, that helped push the technology into the mainstream. 

While virtualization was at first a technology geared toward enterprise customers with large data centers, it is just as relevant to SMBs (small and midsize businesses) because they lack the financial flexibility of larger enterprises, according to Grandinetti.

"When Google or Microsoft or Goldman Sachs needs more capacity, they go and build a new data center.  SMBs tend to have far more limited resources—they have to look for more flexible, scalable alternatives," including virtualization and server consolidation, Grandinetti said. He added that in addition to virtualization, cloud computing technology and VAR-hosted services and infrastructure are two other channel technologies also gaining traction with VARs and their customers, both for their impact on companies' bottom lines and for their ability to reduce energy consumption and cut hardware and physical space costs.