Frontier inks exclusive alliances for virtualization

CHENNAI, INDIA: Benguluru-based Frontier Business Systems has tied up with various vendors, including entering into some exclusive alliances, for strengthening its virtualization offerings to the customers.

The company has enhanced its focus on the server virtualization by adding various solutions of VMware with the inclusion of 'Thinapp,' the application virtualization solution from VMware.

"This has enabled Frontier to position application virtualization along with desktops," said S Arunachalam, Business Head—Virtualization and Application Delivery, Frontier Business Systems.

Earlier this year Frontier launched a separate strategic business unit for virtualization and these tie-ups have enabled it to offer a complete range of virtualization solutions spanning data center to end-user devices across various platforms like servers, storage, applications, desktops, network fabric and printing.

Coming to the other tie-ups, Frontier has signed up Datacore, a US-based company offering storage virtualization, to help it address the problems of under and over utilization of the storage and reducing the management complexities of enterprises.

Datacore has a basic SAN solution called SAN Melody, which is targeted at SMB customers, who are unable to go for virtualization due to the cost involved in having a separate centralized storage facility.

Basic SAN gives all virtualization functionalities to a customer using normal vendor storage at a very cost effective manner.

“Customers can utilize their existing storage capacity and at the same time can enjoy the benefits and full functionality of both server and storage virtualization using the SAN Melody. Also he can move towards subsequent phases of high availability, high availability and disaster recovery, enterprise storage virtualization with multiple storage systems. So with Datacore, we provide complete solution from the SMB to the higher level enterprises,” said Arunachalam.

For enterprise customers, Datacore has a product called SAN Symphony, which can manage petabytes of data, where different kind of storage systems are being used. The utilization of storage networks is completely organized and the enterprise doesn’t lose out on the empty space in the storage networks.

Arunachalam said that the USP of the Datacore’s solution lies in the cost effectiveness, where the solutions that are present with major vendors in this space are about minimum five to 10 times more expensive.

In terms of desktop virtualization, Frontier has the VDI solution from both Citrix and VMware called Zen Desktop and VMware View respectively. The company is ready with the proof of concept centers and necessary skill sets for providing both the platforms to the customers.

Frontier has also become the exclusive authorized service provider in the country for Wyse, the US-based thin client manufacturers, which gives a complete position for the VDI solutions to the company.

It has also associated with a German company called 'Thin Print,' which virtualizes the print function in the organization. If the desktop environment is virtualized then there is no need for the installing the print drivers in that environment when the Thin Print solution is deployed and this solution makes a perfect combination to the VDI scenario in an enterprise. Thin print offers virtualization to VDI, Server based computing and centralized print server scenarios.

For data center optimization and disaster recovery, the company tied-up with PlateSpin earlier last year, for which Frontier is the Gold level partner, which is considered to be the highest level in the country. PlateSpin is involved in managing the Application/ Server workload throughout its lifecycle in the data center.

According to Arunachalam, this solution reduces the risk of virtualization to any organization. “It can mitigate the risk of virtualization for any organization by offering a flexible solution to the customers. The capacity planning, any to any conversion solutions offered by Plate spin is more extensive than any other vendors, where the customers could get highest security level. High availability, better optimization of work load on servers are the other highlights of Plate spin,” he said.

The other exclusive tie-up for Frontier is with Marathon Technologies, which is a high availability and Fault Tolerant solutions provider. The solution offers high availability in both the physical and virtual environment for large level enterprises for which the solution is strongly recommended.

“Marathon is the only organization that is in a position to offer high availability and 99.999 percent fault tolerant solutions for both physical and virtual environments using virtualization technology and industry standard hardware, minus the complexities and huge costs involved in the conventional solutions. Marathon’s Ever run is in a position to provide 99.999 percent availability for any standard Windows application including the custom developed applications on Windows Platform,” Arunachalam claimed.

The solutions have been distributed by a Singapore-based distributor called Providence and Frontier Business Systems has been using the distributors certified resources for the deployment currently. The company has proposed to have their own certified resources shortly.

The company has invested heavily in setting up this Virtualization Business Unit including a state of the art virtual lab with an investment of $500,000 where all these technologies are displayed.

Also, Frontier has initiated a partnership with Vizioncore Inc that provides software that helps organizations safeguard and optimize their virtualized environments and allows them to extract the maximum return on their investment in the VMware platform.

Platespin, Datacore, Wyse, Thin Print, are the alliance partners for both Citrix and VMware and Marathon Technologies is the alliance partners of Citrix.

“With this type of structure, the customers are free to choose their solutions, as they aren’t locked up with one single vendor. We have a right level of partnership with all these companies, so when we go as a solution provider, the investment of the company is protected,” Arunachalam informed.