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Acquisitions

VMware Buys Blue Lane (Updated)

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VMware went shopping and came back home with Cupertino-based Blue Lane Technologies. Despite the lack of press releases, this transaction was confirmed by Mary Ann Gallo, VMware’s head of Global Public Relations. Unfortunately she could not disclose the financial details.

Update: according to Brenon Daly from The 451 Group, the price was around $15 million, and Blue Lane was in search for a buyer since last Summer because of lack of sufficient capital. He also mentions Blue Lane raised “some $18.4m in two rounds of funding”, but our information keeps it at $13.4m.

The acquired company provides solutions that secure virtual and physical data centers. Its solution secures servers and VMs by controlled code execution in the network and taking appropriate countermeasures against traffic aimed at known software vulnerabilities (without signatures).

Blue Lane was quite silent after releasing VirtualShield 4.2 last April. We interviewed Greg Ness, former VP of Marketing with Blue Lane (and avid blogger) and Thierry Evangelista, Technical Director Europe for the company at VMworld Europe earlier this year.

This acquisition confirms VMware’s commitment to virtualization security or VirtSec in short.

Blue Lane was founded in 2002 and has raised $13.4 million to date in two financing rounds from Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Matrix Partners. According to Greg Ness, who left the company last July to join Infoblox, Blue Lane has around 40 employees.

Below, you can find 3 embedded videos encompassing a long interview we did with Ness last June when he was still with the company.


Interview BlueLane Greg Ness 1/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.


Interview BlueLane Greg Ness part 2/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.


Interview BlueLane Greg Ness 3/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

Thanks to Virtualization.info for the news.

Blue Lane Technologies

Double-Take Software Releases netBoot/i and sanFly As Result of emBoot Acquisition

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Double-Take Software today announced the release of its netBoot/i and sanFly products. Together, they can provide a centralized means of booting and managing servers and desktops from iSCSI storage area networks (SANs). These products give IT administrators the flexibility to streamline workload management across both physical and virtual environments, and the cost efficiency of ‘greener IT’ through reduced power consumption and energy costs. Double-Take for Windows, the company’s flagship product, is known for its non-disruptive, affordable, hardware agnostic solutions. The addition of these new product offerings combined with existing capabilities such as continuous full server wide area replication build upon Double-Take Software’s objective to be the leader in Dynamic Infrastructure; that is, to move workloads, for whatever purpose, whenever needed, affordably and non-disruptively.

NetBoot/i is a software-based solution for booting systems from industry-standard iSCSI storage using “off-the-shelf” networking hardware found in most organizations’ server or desktop systems. IT administrators today are often faced with the expense and labor-intensive effort of deploying IT workloads. Once deployed, these same workloads are difficult to move between different servers or desktops because they are tied directly to the servers they run on. With netBoot/i, administrators can use a centralized workload management console to assign workloads, including their boot images, to any available physical or virtual machine in the environment regardless of hardware configuration. Additionally, by enabling diskless servers or desktops, netBoot/i reduces power consumption by minimizing cooling, maximizing cabinet and server rack efficiency.

SanFly is a software-based iSCSI target that turns any Windows server into an iSCSI SAN. With sanFly, setting up iSCSI storage for use by server or desktop systems is as easy as five clicks. SanFly also provides a “shared mode” for iSCSI storage it manages, allowing multiple servers or workstations to access the same shared volume on the storage network.

Double-Take Software acquired netBoot/i and sanFly in the recent purchase of Toronto-based emBoot.

HP Buys LeftHand Networks For $360 Million In Cash

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HP today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire LeftHand Networks, a provider of storage virtualization and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions who recently came out with some impressive numbers.

LeftHand Networks’ solutions enable midsize companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations to easily and cost-effectively protect critical business data. HP has agreed to purchase LeftHand Networks for $360 million in cash, subject to certain purchase price adjustments.
Founded in 1999, LeftHand Networks is privately held and headquartered in Boulder, Colo. It has 215 employees and more than 500 resellers and distributors worldwide. The company has more than 11,000 installations across 3,000 different customers.
With the addition of LeftHand Networks, HP will add midrange offerings to its suite of iSCSI solutions. Customer needs at the low end of the market will be met with the HP StorageWorks All-in-One Storage System (AiO) and HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) product lines. The high end will be addressed by the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) line. Customers will further benefit since LeftHand Networks’ solutions are already certified to work with a wide range of HP products.
The transaction is subject to certain closing conditions and is expected to be completed in HP’s first fiscal quarter of 2009. Following completion, the business will be integrated into the HP StorageWorks division within the Technology Solutions Group at HP.
LeftHand Networks

KVM Lives On At Red Hat, So Now What?

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Over a year after the first big Open Source Virtualization acquisition, Citrix Acquiring Xensource, the next industry shaking acquisition is a fact. Red Hat has reeled in Virtualization startup Qumranet, While RedHat had already announced that they were going to support both KVM and Xen in their product range , taking over Qumranet for some people sounds like a really strange thing to do , afterall apart from its work on KVM as the underlying opensource component of their product, Qumranet is a pretty proprietary software company.

Qumranet understood that the Bare Metal Low Layer virtualization layer was not going to bring them any money any day soon. There were going to be different Free and free alternative Virtualization layers out there anyhow so why keeping theirs secret rather than having it flourish as a community product and contribute back to the linux kernel community while at it.

On the other hand the products of Qumranet were closed, altough based on Linux their business was in selling a VDI solution to bigger customers. The question now becomes how this kind of product range will fit into RedHat’s tradidional Open Source offering. Red Hat has a long history of opensourcing everything they do. Obviously there is Redhat Linux, Jboss but also
the proprietary directory server they bought from Netscape which they opensourced . Sometimes it takes a while, like with their Satellite product, but they have a good track record here. So most parts of the SolidIce product line will be opensourced , but will they grow a community ?

Lots of people ask themselves if RedHat was interrested in the VDI infrastructure or did the just want to have the KVM Kernel developers on board. The fact is that they have a direct entry into managing Windows desktops , a market previously closed for themAnd that makes it an interresting move. As of now, managing a windows box is just managing a file on a Linux server, easy to copy, easy to replace.

With RedHat clearly preferring KVM over Xen in the future. What’s going to happen with Xen in the other distributions.
The 451 group reports that
“Novell insists Xen is its hypervisor of choice and it remains committed to the virtualization software and project.”,
but as we all know .. Novell will be working on other interoperability challenges too.

With Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux being a RedHat derivate the future of Virtualization in Unbreakable becomes an interresting topic.
Oracle clearly choose the Xen platform as their favourite virtualization technology earlier. And given the fact that it will be hosting the next
North American Xen summit , Oracle seems to plan on continuing to build their platform on Xen.

To close of there’s also the question of people at Qumranet, Qumranet was cofounded by serial virtualization enterpreneur Moshe Bar who previously had also cofouned Qlusters and Xensource What’s he going to do , will he stay around at RedHat or will he refocus to his other startup Sullego.

In a couple of weeks Xensource will celebrate it’s first anniversary at Citrix , let’s see what happens then …

Teksys Acquires Technology Made Simple Assets

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Earlier this year, UK-based LAR Teksys was acquired by private equity investors Alan Watkins and Kevin Lewis, who revealed the firm would be making a number of acquisitions to build its business.

Teksys has made good its acquisition spree promise by acquiring the assets of Technology Made Simple (TMS). The acquisition of the VAR, which is a Microsoft Gold Partner, a VMware partner and an HP Platinum Partner was made for an undisclosed sum.

More information is available at Channel Register.

PHD Technologes “Acq-hires” Xtravirt Co-founder Alex Mittell

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PHD Technologies (previous coverage), provider of the esXPRESS data protection solution for virtualized infrastructures, today announced the acquisition of UK-based Xtravirt’s suite of virtualization products. As part of the transaction, Xtravirt co-founder, Alex Mittell, will join PHD Technologies as Director of Research & Development. Xtravirt will continue to partner with PHD Technologies as a distributor of esXPRESS to existing and new Xtravirt customers in the UK.

The virtualization tools acquired by PHD Technologies’ will benefit managers of virtualization infrastructures. These include VI3 SnapHunter, a virtual machine snapshot reporter; VI3 PatchDownloader, an automated downloader of VMware ESX patches; VISBU, an infrastructure backup utility and KS Quick Config, a tool to speed up the deployment and configuration of VMware ESX 3 servers.

Alex Mittell is widely known as a technical expert and thought leader in the virtualization community. Prior to co-founding Xtravirt, he worked at Oxford University in the UK as a virtual architect, setting up the university’s virtual infrastructure. Mittell will continue to be based in London.