In a special report on Virtualization, Gartner says “Virtualization is the highest-impact issue changing infrastructure and operations through 2012, changing how and what you buy, as well as how you manage it.” Those are some pretty strong words, even for Gartner.

The research firm believes that virtualization is allowing organizations to get more out of their infrastructure. As a proof point, Gartner cites a small decline in the x 86 server market in 2006 as fewer physical servers are needed to run more virtualized applications.

Mike Piltoff, Senior Vice President of Champion Solutions Group of Boca Raton, Fla., would probably concur with Gartner’s assessment of the virtualization market growth. Piltoff says that Champion has already installed a thousand VMware configurations for customers.

Champion Solutions Group has a heritage in the data management business. Piltoff says the company specializes in helping customers unify disparate storage systems, plan for business continuity and disaster recovery, and consolidate server and storage implementations. He says VMware helps to create unique situations for managing images vs. data sets, making Champion’s job much easier.

One of the weapons in the Champion arsenal is Acronis True Image Virtual Edition, a new product released in June by Acronis. This product allows an organization to back up and restore (Compare Data Backup and Replication products) from five or more virtual machines on a single virtual machine for one simple price. Piltoff says this unique pricing model provides his customers with a better ROI.

“When we talk to our clients about virtualizing their environment, we discuss not only the cost of the applications but also the supporting environment,” says Piltoff. “They have to factor in the cost of managing the applications and backing up the data. The Acronis True Image Virtual Edition really lowers the cost of a virtual environment. A single software license that is enterprise-oriented is very economic and quick for our clients.”

Even if an organization has hundreds of virtual machines on just one physical server, only one $2,599 license of Acronis True Image Virtual Edition is needed to back up and restore all of the virtual machines. This flat fee pricing is still rather unique, as many software companies are trying to figure out the best way to license their software in a virtual environment. Some charge for each processor, operating system or virtual server. The flat fee pricing allows organizations to be more accurate in their budgeting and not be concerned about non-compliance with the Acronis licensing agreement when new virtual machines are added to the server.

Piltoff says Champion uses Acronis software to help clients move applications from a physical server to a virtual server (P2V), and sometimes from a virtual server to a physical one (V2P). “Acronis provides more than a tool to us,” says Piltoff. “It’s a real solution. Acronis software helps us do bare metal recovery with system restore, as well as image movement and recovery. We can restore images to dissimilar hardware, and this is big for us.” He also points out that there’s a large Linux community that Acronis caters to as well.