French IT vendor Bull is launching a channel partner program for companies interested in selling its bullion servers in the US this week.

Jim Custer, Bull's US director of sales and marketing, said, “We believe that the bullion server offering will create an attractive and accretive alternative for partners and customers alike."

The bullion server, born from the company's legacy in mainframe and extreme computing, is an x86 server certified by VMware to scale to 16 CPUs, (up to 160 cores). The Bull (BCS) node controller technology allows for nearly linear scalability from one to 16 processors.

The company is marketing the servers for use in the virtualization of business-critical applications, consolidation, private cloud and proprietary-to-standard architecture migrations.

Bull announced the program at a VMware partner conference in Las Vegas.

It first introduced the bullion server in Europe and other select global regions in April 2010, and has since deployed to hundreds of customers, including Xerox GDO, the French Ministry, major telecom operators, banks and manufacturers, the company said.

Bull has partnered with EMC to certify bullion as an authorized server platform through the VSPEX program in conjunction with VMware and Brocade.