Fusepoint Launches Virtualization Solutions through VMware Service Provider Program

December 6, 2007; 05:13 AM

(PRWEB) December 6, 2007 -- Fusepoint Managed Services, a leading provider of infrastructure and IT services, today announced that it has joined the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP). In adopting this program and offering VMware, Fusepoint will now offer managed hosting solutions running on VMware across physical and virtual servers for both large enterprise and small to medium sized businesses, making it one of the first fully-managed service providers in Canada to be authorized.

VSPP incorporates a new licensing model that makes the industry-leading VMware Infrastructure suite available to Fusepoint on a per-virtual machine, per-month basis. With this new program, Fusepoint offers managed infrastructure hosting solutions using VMware to its customers, improving the management of existing applications and giving customers just-in-time resource allocation and disaster recovery within the solution.

In addition, Fusepoint has recently deployed virtualization services for its customer support platform; allowing 34 servers to be consolidated onto 6, supporting over 20 different applications.

"Virtualization is a proven technology that has the potential to transform the IT landscape and managed services environment," said George Kerns, President and CEO, Fusepoint Managed Services. "By adopting VMware's virtualization technology and investing in our staff who have received VMware Certified Professional (VCP) designations, our customers can leverage the knowledge and tools in place to refresh and consolidate their systems - ultimately creating an optimized, high availability IT infrastructure."

Benefits of virtualized IT management solutions include:

• greater savings in both capital and operating costs;
• increased hardware utilization and reducing hardware requirements with server consolidation;
• reduced cost of power proportionate to the consolidation achieved;
• improved responsiveness, serviceability, and flexibility of IT infrastructure;
• greater application availability and business continuity independent of hardware and operating systems;
• continuous uptime and non-disruptive maintenance of IT environments
• improved responsiveness to business needs with rapid provisioning and dynamic optimization of application environments; and
• allows legacy systems to co-exist with new environments.

Founded in 1999, Fusepoint is a privately held company with offices and data centres in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City. Through our proven record of success we have built a loyal base of over 400 customers and strong, strategic relationships with Canada's leading technology and communication companies.

Fusepoint's managed IT solutions are SLA-guaranteed, scalable and designed to reduce cost structures while mitigating risk. Fusepoint is also SAS 70 Type II, CICA 5970, and most recently PCI compliant, which means our processes are rigorously and continuously audited by an accredited third party and consistently operate at the highest levels within the industry. For more information, visit www.fusepoint.com

Potential Q&A

Why are you offering VMware

• Fusepoint is supporting VMware because it is a natural extension of our Fully Managed offering and we see great opportunities to differentiate ourselves from other providers in Canada.
• We have also adopted the service to support our customer support applications allowing Fusepoint to consolidate from 34 servers to 6.

• Through the VMware Service Provider Program, Fusepoint can offer a new licensing model that makes the industry-leading VMware Infrastructure suite available on a per-virtual machine, per-month basis. Previously organizations would have to purchase individual enterprise licenses which would make the offering cost prohibitive to the mid market. The new offering really opens things up and reduces the barrier to entry.

• greater savings in both capital and operating costs;
• increased hardware utilization and reducing hardware requirements with server consolidation;
• greater application availability and business continuity independent of hardware and operating systems;

• We are always looking for efficiencies and by adopting VMware most organizations can expect to reduce the number of servers they are running and in turn the power and cooling required, in the grand scheme of running a major facility the effect is minimal.

• Out of the gate Fusepoint's solutions using VMware will be for dedicated customer environments. For example, our solutions are ideal for mid-size customers looking to refresh and consolidate several physical servers onto fewer servers running VMware. Fusepoint will manage the VMware layer and features as well as the OS, Web, DB, etc. (like we typically do) for each virtual machine within that environment.
• If asked about multi-tenant environments (i.e. several customers hosted on a pooled/shared server farm all managed by Fusepoint), this is something that we are evaluating on a limited basis for specific customer scenarios - dev/staging/test, temporary/swing, and low-resource application environments.
• Bottom line is that we are not going down-market to the high-volume virtual server hosting segment.