"Consolidating infrastructures is the major challenge for most CIOs and it is only possible with a totally reliable and easy-to-implement platform. That is why we have designed the NovaScale VMBox solution. As a pre-integrated and tested solution NovaScale VMbox provides high availability through a complete redundancy of components and a total compliance with VMware recommendations", stated Olivier Gaumont, Director of Bull's Enterprise Servers Business Unit.

Certified "Virtualized by VMware", NovaScale VMBox is particularly intended for companies wishing a cost-effective consolidation of their infrastructures while benefiting from a very secure application implementation environment with VMware.

The NovaScale VMBox virtualization solution meets major challenges related to sustainable development by reducing the number of deployed servers.

NovaScale VMBox provides a choice of pre-integrated and fine-tuned configurations consisting of servers, storage sub-systems and pre-loaded software. Combined with the Bull Calypso back-up solution in VMware environments, and with an integrated management, NovaScale VMBox enables a secure operation. In addition, the NovaScale VMBox offering is delivered with dedicated services to guarantee the application high availability.

In order to speed up the infrastructure deployment and facilitate the implementation of virtualized solutions, NovaScale VMBox configurations are completely pre-integrated, thus enabling a 10 times faster deployment of an infrastructure at a lower cost.

Bull delivers a variety of services from the installation to the operation of the virtualization solution as well as the parameterization and fine-tuning of the configuration in order to meet its customers' needs.

In addition, Bull's virtualization Competence Center brings its expertise in sizing, proof of concept (POC), best practices and optimization to deliver ready-to-deploy configurations on the customer site.

Bull is launching the first two NovaScale VMBox configurations supporting VMware ESX Server 3.5:

• NovaScale VMBox Discovery including one cluster of 2 NovaScale Universal servers (a total of 16 cores), a Bull StoreWay storage sub-system with a 2.4 TB capacity and VMware Infrastructure Standard Edition. The VMware VirtualCenter Foundation management platform is hosted on a separate NovaScale server. Up to 16 virtual machines can be managed by this cluster.
• NovaScale VMBox Enterprise including one cluster of 2 high performance NovaScale Universal (a total of 32 cores), Bull StoreWay storage sub-systems with a 3.6 TB capacity and VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition. The VMware VirtualCenter management platform is hosted on a separate NovaScale server. Up to 32 virtual machines can be managed by this cluster which can be extended by adding additional nodes, each node supporting 32 additional virtual machines.

List price of a Discovery configuration with16 cores, 32GB memory, 2.4 TB disk capacity, and VMware software is 50K euro.

The first two NovaScale VMBox modules are available immediately.