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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Robin Wauters

NY Times: Virtual Iron Was Bleeding Money When Oracle Bought It

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We recently reported Oracle had acquired Virtual Iron, but now The NY Times has obtained financial documents that show Virtual Iron lost a heck of a lot of money in 2008:

“The documents indicate that Virtual Iron had just $3.4 million in revenue last year. That’s a big rise over $1.5 million in 2007. But Virtual Iron sure spent a lot of money to get that revenue.

Its sales, marketing, research, development and administrative costs were $17.7 million last year, up from $13.6 million in 2007. So, in 2008, Virtual Iron posted a loss of $15.3 million.

Last January, Virtual Iron raised $20 million, hiking its total funding up to $65 million. Highland Capital Partners, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital and SAP Ventures all funded the company.

Oracle has declined to reveal how much it paid for Virtual Iron, but with the revenue in 2008 sitting so low, it seems pretty clear that the investors lost out on this start-up — that is, unless Oracle was willing to pay many, many times Virtual Iron’s revenue. (The company did report $17 million in cash and equivalents in 2008.)”

Ouch. Hard to get excited over this particular case of M&A, even in these troubled times.

Vizioncore Already Boasts Support For VMware vSphere 4

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Vizioncore yesterday announced that it is already able to support VMware vSphere, made generally available also yesterday by VMware.

The broad product set from Vizioncore including vFoglight (available now), vReplicator (available now), vOptimizer Pro (within 30 days) and its flagship backup and restore solution, vRanger Pro (within 45 days), will continue to extend VMware vSphere 4 and enable organizations to protect, monitor, optimize and automate VMware’s revolutionary new operating system for building an internal cloud.

VMware vSphere 4 Arrives Ahead Of Schedule

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VMware yesterday announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 4, delivered ahead of schedule and with the support of an extensive partner ecosystem and customers around the globe.

VMware vSphere 4 extends the previous generation VMware platform — VMware Infrastructure 3 — along three dimensions: it delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications in large scale environments, it provides uncompromised control over application security and service levels, and it preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

VMware vSphere 4 enables transformative capital and operational expenditure cost savings over and above what was previously achievable, including 30 percent increase in consolidation ratios, 50 percent storage savings, and 20 percent additional power savings. With VMware vSphere 4, even the most resource intensive business critical applications will benefit from the built-in service level assurance capabilities for availability, security and scalability.

Customers are already harnessing VMware vSphere 4 to bring the benefits of cloud computing to their datacenters, creating a practical approach to their own private clouds — cloud computing infrastructures that span internal IT with external cloud service providers.

VMware vSphere 4 is available in six editions meeting the requirements, use cases and budgets of customers of all sizes from small businesses to the largest enterprises and government organizations. Prices start at $166 per processor for all in one virtualization solutions for small businesses and go up to VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus priced at $3,495 per processor delivering features to transform the datacenter into an internal private cloud.

Sun To Virtualize … Good Old Tape Drives?

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Sun Microsystems has reportedly revealed plans to add one of the newest storage technologies into one of the oldest storage methods in use: tape drives. The news comes from VNUnet.com:

The company said on Tuesday that it will update its line of StorageTek tape drive systems with a new virtualisation manager.

Sun said that the latest version of the StorageTek drives would support tape capacities of up to 1TB, and overall system capacity of some 90TB.

StorageTek Virtual Systems Manager will allow companies to manage and operate data stored on tape backup for use in tasks such as archiving and disaster recovery.

The vendor hopes that the systems will appeal to companies looking to handle growing capacity while navigating the economic crisis. Sun’s tape storage units have maintained strong growth rates in recent months.

EMC VP Chad Sakac: “We Want To Leave VMware Independent”

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At the EMC annual user conference (EMC World 2009), Chad Sakac, VP of the VMware Technology Alliance at EMC, told IT PRO magazine that the company reaffirms the promise it made to keep VMware as an independent company.

“We are determined to leave them independent. Both EMC customers and non-EMC customers have thanked us. We want everyone to have access to the technology but come to EMC on merit.”

But also:

“No-one knows what is around the corner but it would be short sighted of us to do it as this point. There are no plans [to remove its independence] in the works now and no plans to do so in the future.”

Doesn’t sound all too convincing, agrees VMBlog, who alerted us to the IT Pro article.

Former Vizioncore CEO David Bieneman Is Back With A New Startup

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Founder and former CEO of Vizioncore, David Bieneman, is back after selling the company he started to Quest Software in January 2008. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s now the CEO of a startup called Liquidware Labs.

Alessandro guesses the company will be doing something in the desktop virtualization sphere:

The company tagline, The Art & Science of the Desktop, and the Roher profile on LinkedIn unveil that Liquidware Labs will be active in the VDI space, will address the PSO organizations, and that will leverage the technology of vmSight, recently acquired while in stealth mode for an undisclosed sum.

vmSight is a startup that offers a solution to track how the users work on the virtual desktops, through the analysis of their network activity. Think about it as a network sniffer that re-assembles the snooped packets to understand the history and the performance of a VDI session and make it easier to troubleshoot.

What Liquidware Labs will do with this technology which is covered by 13 patents?

Time will tell.