With Information Technology being a key business driver for regional organizations, CIO's are constantly facing challenges when they are expected to cost effectively deliver better results for their current IT investment.

These challenges were addressed at the 'Sun Virtualization Solution Day' recently held in Bahrain by Sun Microsystems and its partner Almoayyed Computers.

The event highlighted Sun's leadership in energy efficient cool threads servers and virtualization solutions, and was attended by more than 50 Sun customers.

The 'Sun Virtualization Solution Day' highlights the role that virtualization plays in an optimized IT infrastructure, and presented a set of principles and best practices to help regional organizations build a comprehensive virtualization strategy.

'Virtualization is gaining much attention across regional organizations looking to address IT infrastructure and consolidation challenges, to improve the efficiency of their IT operations and enhance their responsiveness to changing business environment' said Marc Heger, Gulf District Manager, Sun Microsystems MENA.

'Virtualization technologies provide enterprises with the ability to do more with less and enables the consolidation of data and applications onto a single server, or to virtualize across multiple environments. Industry analysts have predicted virtualization to be the way forward for organizations wanting to optimize resources, reduce power and cooling requirements, overcome space constraints, and slash operation costs. Focused on consolidating resources in the data center, virtualization also has applications across the IT spectrum helping to drive down costs and improve capabilities and performance,' added Heger.

Sun's partner Almoayyed Computers have played an active part in positioning Sun as an x64 server alternative with its Intel/AMD based servers to take the message of a virtualized IT environment to organizations seeking agility and efficiency.

Almoayyed Computers is a Sun Principal SPA partner and have generated incremental business from growth areas outside Sun's current footprint in the Bahraini market. Sun's close relationship with VMware was also demonstrated through the vendor's participation in the event.

'Enterprises in Bahrain and across the Middle East region are embracing a digital work style that expects them to stay competitive in a dynamic and global business environment,' said SM Hussaini, General Manager, Almoayyed Computers. 'The 'Sun Virtualization Solution Day' is an opportunity to strategically position Sun as a solution provider capable of providing end to end virtualization solutions in Servers, Storage and Desktops, driving resource utilization and increasing total return on investments, in addition to boosting agility and efficiency.