Robin Wauters

Gear6 Raises $ 10 Million from Horizon Ventures, US Venture Partners and InterWest Partners

March 27, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Mountain View-based Gear6 today announced it has secured a $ 10 million financing round led by Horizon Ventures. Existing investors U.S. Venture Partners and InterWest Partners also participated in the round. The closing of this financing round brings the total capital invested in Gear6 to $24.5 million.

Gear6 accelerates I/O for real-time application performance and delivers centralized caching solutions in the data center. It’s most notable product is CACHEfx, a line of appliances that deliver high I/O operations per second and extremely low latency to accelerate the performance of data intensive applications, integrating both a hardware and software solution.

“We are pleased to welcome Horizon Ventures as an investor in Gear6,‘ said Tom Shea, president and chief executive officer. ‘The market for our CACHEfx scalable caching appliances is poised for significant growth and this financing round gives us the opportunity to meet increasing demand for centralized caching solutions across key markets including performance computing, databases, business intelligence, web-scale and virtualized environments.”

[Source: Ad-Hoc-News]

Keep It Quiet, But Parallels Acquired ModernGigabyte

March 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

The Register sure has some pretty observant readers. Apparently one of them noticed an early preview of a deal which has been forged two months ago but was only to be announced tomorrow: Parallels acquired ModernGigabyte, the makers of billing software ModernBill and other automation solutions for the hosting provider market.

From the website section about the deal, which is supposed to be shared with the press starting tomorrow:

What is Parallels announcing?

Parallels is announcing the acquisition of ModernGigabyte, the creators of the ModernBill automated billing system.

What is Parallels acquiring?

Parallels is acquiring all of the assets of ModernGigabyte, including its products, services, intellectual property, and its existing staff. ModernGigabyte products include:

ModernBill, a billing system for hosting and service providers

ModernAuthorize, a real-time payment and credit card processing service

SSL Factory, an automated delivery system for SSL cetificates

ModernDNS, an automated domain registration service

FraudGuardian, a real-time fraud checking service for online ordering

Why did Parallels acquire ModernGigabyte?

Parallels believes that customers will benefit from this acquisition. ModernBill is already integrated with many of the Parallels family of hosting products and now small hosting providers will be able to purchase both control panels and a billing solution from the same company.

Dedicated hosting providers can offer ModernBill along with Plesk to create a complete reseller package.

Parallels ISV partners which have adopted the Application Packaging Standard (APS) will benefit by having a ready to deliver solution for hosting companies to sell their products.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and the deal between the two private firms was actually approved by both companies on January 11 of this year. Note that Parallels plans to maintain the current prices on the ModernBill website.

Virtualization and Brain Fitness Don’t Mix

March 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Entrepreneur, investor and Open Source pioneer Brian Berliner (whose blog is a must-subscribe, by the way) discovered that not all applications run on virtual machines. After winning a Posit Science Brain Fitness Program Classic, Brian found out that besides having an unnecessary long name, the program doesn’t run on VMware Fusion, which he installed on his Mac computer.

Anyone have a good answer to his question about why some developers forbid running apps on virtual machines? What’s the difference anyway?

Update: Brian received a comment from a Posit Science rep who lets us know the program runs under Boot Camp and Parallels, and that they’re expecting to release a Mac version by the end of the year.

Excellent example of how companies should treat customers who use blog and social networks to voice their opinions!

Also, check out the comment from Joe on this post, who gave a lengthy and most likely completely correct answer to the technical side of the matter.

Montego Networks Exits Stealth Mode, Unveils HyperSwitch To Secure Virtualized Networks

March 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Shortly before the start of the security event RSA Conference 2008, the co-founders of Boston-based Montego Networks Bob Darabant and John Peterson announced the launch of their new company, whose Montego HyperSwitch is an innovative virtual security networking solution that delivers policy enforcement, access control, and secure switching for virtual networks.

In their press release, the self-funded company claims virtualization incurs “unique network and application security risks which, if left unaddressed, leave virtual machines, virtualized applications and critical data exposed to service interruptions, data theft, regulatory compliance violations and other threats.”

The company exits stealth mode with their HyperSwitch product, attempting to address these vulnerabilities better than the current available network security solutions, which they claim often offer limited coverage that may create a false sense of security.

“The Montego HyperSwitch approaches virtualized network security from a new direction that integrates network policy enforcement and access control with a high-availability virtual security switch. This unique approach allows the Montego HyperSwitch to efficiently deliver advanced capabilities including policy-based virtual network partitioning, L2-L4 Firewall, Identity Firewall, Content Firewall, virtual network discovery, secure inter-VM communication, 802.1Q VLANs, 802.1D spanning tree, load-balanced Quality of Service (QoS), Policy Based Switching, Policy Based Traffic Mirroring, and more. In addition, Montego’s carefully-calibrated HyperVSecurity technology enables high performance and exceptionally low host resource consumption.”

In April 2008, Montego Networks plans to start offering a Starter Edition of the Montego HyperSwitch as a free download, and selling its Enterprise Edition, for which the introductory price is list-priced at $ 495 USD (per annual software license) in the US.

As for its compatibility roadmap:

“Montego’s HyperVSecurity release 1.5 initially supports VMWare, but has been architected to operate within heterogeneous virtualization environments to provide additional support for Citrix, Virtual Iron, and Microsoft virtualization technology in Q3-2008.”

“Security for virtual environments is imperative. While some security vendors are now touting security for virtual networks, users often find their solutions are incomplete or impractical,” said Bob Darabant. “The Montego HyperSwitch is a completely new approach that integrates high performance virtual security, high-availability virtual switching and an open, interoperable security framework. This allows users to enjoy complete protection for their virtual networks along with the open flexibility to leverage their choice of multi-vendor security offerings.”

You can view a web-video demonstration of Montego Networks here.

[Source: press release]

Egenera Inks OEM Deal With Dell

March 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Dell has agreed to resell and ship Egenera‘s Processing Area Network (PAN) Manager I/O virtualization software on its PowerEdge servers by June of this year. Egenera claims PAN is the epitome of what IDC calls “Virtualization 2.0,” the next step beyond simple VMware-style single server virtualization replete with scalability, faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery and resource balancing. Pricing for the software has yet to be released.

Egenera’s PAN Manager supports Citrix Systems Inc.’s Citrix XenServer and VMware Inc.’s virtual machines and the company plans to support Microsoft’s virtualization technology, Hyper-V, when it becomes available later this year, CTO Peter Manca said.

The OEM deal with Dell is obviously not exclusive, meaning PAN could still wind up on IBM and HP gear, although that path seems much harder to follow than sticking with Dell. The computer giant intends to sell the widgetry on PowerEdge servers initially through its Advanced Solutions unit along with infrastructure consulting services.

From the press release:

“Dell is listening to customers and providing solutions that make the virtual data center easier to deploy and manage, regardless of platform,” said Rick Becker, vice president, Dell Software & Solutions. “Dell and Egenera will help customers focus on company growth by delivering excellence in virtualized infrastructure from server performance, storage interoperability to dynamic data center management.”

“The Dell-Egenera relationship was driven by customer need for simple, agile and cost-effective solutions that virtualize and unify data center assets beyond a single server,” said Mike Thompson, president and CEO, Egenera. “We’re driving to provide customers with a powerful, integrated way to manage server, network and storage assets, with lower operational costs, increased resource utilization and uptime.”

[Source: SearchServerVirtualization]

Elastra Makes Cloud Computing More Accessible For Enterprises

March 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

San Francisco-based startup Elastra seeks to “unlock the value of the cloud” with a new service that lets enterprises quickly create database applications on utility computing platforms like Amazon Web Services. The company says its Elastra Cloud Server offers an easier way to deploy applications on Amazon’s infrastructure, providing customers with two markup languages that can be used to create database-driven services. The Cloud Server uses a metered, pay-per-use software pricing model, and will be available in April.

Elastra’s tools include the Elastic Computing Markup Language (ECML) and Elastic Deployment Markup Language (EDML), and system management dashboards to scale deployments. Available databases include MySQL, PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB, an Oracle-compatible database which just raised $ 10 million in Series C financing.

Dana Gardner at ZDNet notes:

In general the Elastra approach provides onramps to compute clouds based on descriptive tools that help reduce complexity for IT departments. This should encourage experimentation and ultimately lead to ramp ups in the use of public clouds, as well as the build-out and use of home-grown, so-called private clouds. Less attention has been given of late to the promise of private clouds, which are really a natural extension of current datacenter consolidation, clustering, application modernization, ITIL and virtualization initiatives.

…

Part of Elastra’s DNA is putting more data in the cloud, where it can be used assiduously to support apps, services and business processes. And once the data layer makes its way to the cloud (private, public or both), can the rest of the support infrastructure be far behind? We’re already seeing a lot of talk around integration as a service, and infrastructure as a service. And we’re also increasingly seeing tools and development as a service.

[Source: Data Center Knowledge]