Starting this month, and through the end of September, solution providers will receive a rebate check at the end of each month for their costs of their purchases of Seanodes' software, letting them keep all the profit from their sales, said Frank Gana, Seanodes business development director.

The France-based vendor, which has its U.S. headquarters in Boston, is the developer of Exanodes software, which allows the building of clustered virtual iSCSI storage appliances inside a host server for use as a low-cost storage network for virtual servers.

The company last week started shipping Exanodes VM Edition, which allows clustered virtual iSCSI appliances to be built in VMware virtual server environments without the need for additional external storage, Gana said.

Prior to the new channel margin promotion, the company had been focusing on high-performance computing environments, Gana said.

"Now we're focusing on a new set of partners," he said. "We're looking for resellers or distributors of VMware solutions who are not storage resellers, as well as storage resellers with good expertise in VMware."

Seanodes is especially targeting channel partners who worked with iSCSI and virtual storage appliance pioneer LeftHand Networks before that company was acquired by Hewlett-Packard last October.

The new rebate program is aimed at solution providers, not end users, Gana said. Partners can use the rebate according to their own policies, including offering customers better pricing or a discount.

The rebate is limited to up to 100 physical servers running VMware's ESX server virtualization software. Each physical server requires one license. The Seanodes software lists for $950 per ESX server.

Seanodes also supports server virtualization based on technology from Xen.org, but does not yet support Citrix XenServer, Gana said. The company also is porting its software to work with Microsoft's Hyper-V server virtualization technology, and is currently beta testing a version to work with Windows Server 2008, he said.