Virtual Iron Software, a provider of data center virtualization and management software, today announced that it has joined the Sun Partner Advantage Program. The announcement coincides with Virtual Iron's recent support of Sun Microsystems' new x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers, the Sun Fire X4100 and Sun Fire X4200, powered by AMD Opteron processors. Participation in the Sun Partner Advantage Program entitles ISVs such as Virtual Iron to a wide range of Sun offerings that support product porting and migration, technical assistance and joint marketing. Virtual Iron offers enterprise-class data center virtualization and policy-based management solutions that deliver maximum flexibility to production-level workloads such as Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application servers, databases and high performance computing applications. With these solutions, organizations can more rapidly respond to changing business demands and dramatically reduce the cost of managing and operating the data center. While first generation server virtualization technologies focus on less demanding workloads, Virtual Iron is designed for enterprise-class Linux applications. By creating a virtualized pool of shared data center resources including server, storage and network elements, the Virtual Iron software enables enterprises to dynamically allocate resources to applications as needed, minimizing data center complexity, increasing agility and maximizing resource utilization. This enables enterprises to run any application, on any resource, at any time, dramatically reducing total cost of ownership. With its support of the Opteron-based Sun Fire x64 servers, Virtual Iron will further reduce cost and complexity in the data center for its Linux customers. The Sun Fire X4100 and Sun Fire X4200 servers consume about one-third the power, provide one-and-a-half times the performance and cost half as much as comparably configured 4-way servers. They are designed to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by providing high availability and scalability with virtually no downtime, in addition to flexible resource management. "Transitioning the data center to a more dynamic virtual model is essential to reducing the complexity and improving the responsiveness of today's IT organization," said Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron. "By supporting the Sun Fire x64 servers, we enable Sun users, for the first time, to leverage the full power of a dynamic data center infrastructure and the dramatic gains it offers in agility, performance and operating expense."