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.
Channel News and Analysis 
