Our regular scope of supply includes products and consultancy in three main areas.

Virbis offer consultation, design, implementation and support offerings for server hardware virtualisation projects based on products from VMware, PlateSpin and other leading suppliers of virtualisation software. These engagements routinely include the ‘traditional’ machine virtualisation design goals of hardware consolidation and legacy application/OS support, but our specialist interest and focus is in the achievement of highly available and geographically distributed architectures for the purposes of business continuity and disaster recovery.

Server Virtualisation requires a SAN infrastructure for some facets of its potential to be realised. Early adopters of SAN technology have, through reasons of market availability, chosen hardware solutions. The relatively high costs associated with these represents a barrier to their widespread uptake and a long payback period. Their proprietary nature and an early lack of standardisation in the market have led to generally poor return on investment and early obsolescence. In common with the hardware-abstracted approach of Server Virtualisation, Virbis provides highly performing iSCSI and FC SANs implemented in software and hosted on generic WIntel platforms. Fully featured SANs can be deployed starting from small and investment-lean SAN appliance-centric solutions and can still scale as required throughout the lifetime of the server infrastructure. Advanced features such as synchronous and asynchronous replication, WAN replication, Cluster Support, and Hot-Failover may be added as licensed features, rather than fork-lift upgrades.

Products and solutions for Server and Storage Virtualisation are rapidly gaining acceptance and installed-base but many opportunities for the technologies to achieve their full potential have yet to be addressed. Virbis is currently developing a number of Virtualisation products which complement and add value to those currently available from the mainstream, with the intention of always being able to offer the most complete and best integrated Virtual Infrastructures, without entry costs that exclude the smaller business. A range of Storage and Server virtualisation products are planned for release in 2006.