It may only have a population of about 16.5m, but that has not stopped I/O consolidation and virtualization solutions company NextIO from making a move into the Kazakhstan market.

NextIO has formed a partnership with data center equipment distributor KVINT to sell equipment to the market.

While its population may be relatively small, Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country in the world and economic growth, due largely to its large oil and gas reserves, has improved government finance in recent years.

It is expected that by 2015, the country will be able to produce as much as 3m barrels of oil per da, making it one of the top 10 oil-producing nations.

NextIO said its solutions are aimed at the enterprise, oil and gas, high perfroamnce computing and financial services market.

In recent years, HPC has entered the oil and gas space, helping companies deal with rising amounts of data required for exploration and identificagtion of oil and gas proppects.

SGI only last month announced that it was working with French-based Total to install the world’s largest supercomputer seen in a commercial environment for calaculating data representing strata to allow geoscientists, geo phsysicsts and more gain a full view of the exploration environment.

KVINT said it will distribute NextIO’s I/O Maestro – a rack level appliance , vSTOR – a high performance flash storage array that can achieve 14TB over 2.1M IOPS performance and vCoure – an enterprise class GPU consolidation appliance.

NextIO SVP of worldwide salesa dn marketing Mike Heumann said the data center market in Kazakhstan is still emerging, but KVINT general director Gani Torshin said many data center oeprators in the country are now looking to virtualize.

“So many of our customers [are] using virtualization, we are excited to bea dding NextIO’s I/O consolidation devices to our portfolio,” Torshin said.

He said the NextIO addition will provide customers with new ways to manage increasing data center complexity while lowering IT costs.