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Acquisitions

SolarWinds Acquires Hyper9, Launches Application Performance Monitor

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SolarWinds, a provider of IT management software, recently announced that it is entering the application performance and virtualization management markets through the launch of SolarWinds Application Performance Monitor (APM) and the acquisition of Hyper9, a privately-held virtualization management software provider.

SolarWinds’ Application Performance Monitor is an application and server management product that provides visibility into the performance of critical IT services, the underlying application components, the operating system, and the Windows, Unix and Linux server resources on which they run.

Pricing starts at $2,495, with the first year of maintenance included.

Hyper9’s virtualization management offering adds optimization, capacity planning, configuration and chargeback reporting for virtualized server environments to the SolarWinds portfolio. The company expects to offer the virtualization management products at pricing starting at $3000, including the first year of maintenance.

Breaking: NetApp To Acquire Akorri Networks In All-Cash Transaction

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NetApp today announced that it is to acquire Akorri Networks, which enables IT organizations to increase virtualization ROI through optimization and planning of their virtual and physical infrastructure resources.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but it was all-cash, NetApp says. Akorri was founded in 2005 and has raised $48.7 million in funding to date.

Akorri’s BalancePoint software uses cross-domain analysis and analytics to help companies manage, optimize, and plan performance and utilization across their data center infrastructure. BalancePoint provides visibility into the root cause of performance issues through drill-down into server and storage resources and the ability to understand both server and storage virtualization.

The acquisition is expected to close early in NetApp’s fourth fiscal quarter, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

(TechCrunchIT)

Rackspace Acquires Server Management Platform Startup Cloudkick

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Hosting company Rackspace is acquiring startup Cloudkick, which offers a server management system to businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cloudkick, based in San Francisco, boasts more than 1,500 customers and has more than 1 million servers pass through its tools.

In the coming months, Cloudkick’s offering will be integrated into the Rackspace family of products.

And for some good news:

To “kick” things off, starting today, all basic monitoring checks (HTTP, HTTPS, PING/ICMP, SSH, DNS, and TCP) are now 100% free on an unlimited number of servers for all our accounts — from the free forever developer account to our 1000 server plan.

For more information, check Cloudkick’s FAQ on the topic.

(Source: TechCrunch)

Dell To Buy Virtualized Storage Solutions Provider Compellent For $820 Million

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Dell has announced its intent to pick up Compellent, a provider of virtualized storage solutions with automated data management features, for $27.75 per share in cash for each share of Compellent (that’s a total equity value of approximately $960 million).

The aggregate purchase price is about $820 million, net of Compellent’s cash.

With the acquisition, Dell aims to broaden its portfolio of enterprise-class storage solutions:

The acquisition of Compellent will deliver on Dell’s commitment to provide its customers solutions that are open, capable and affordable. Dell delivers an open and integrated approach to data management that drives efficiency and dramatically reduces costs by streamlining operations.

The transaction, which has been approved by both companies’ boards but is still subject to approval by Compellent’s shareholders and customary closing conditions, is expected to close in early 2011.

Dell recently lost a bidding war for storage company 3PAR, against HP.

HP To Acquire 3PAR After Dell Walks Away From Bidding War

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The bidding war between HP and Dell for data storage company 3PAR is over.

The winner? Hewlett-Packard, with a $2.4 billion offer. That was 83 percent above Dell’s first offer and more than three times what 3Par stock was trading at then.

The only silver lining for Dell?

It is entitled to receive a $72 million break-up fee from 3PAR upon the termination of its merger agreement.

Make sure to read this good article from the AP following Dell’s withdrawal from the bidding war.

Citrix Acquires VMLogix

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Citrix earlier this week announced several key additions to its Citrix OpenCloud infrastructure platform for cloud providers. To further accelerate its OpenCloud strategy, Citrix also announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire VMLogix, a provider of virtualization management for private and public clouds.

The acquisition of VMLogix is expected to close in the third quarter of 2010, subject to the satisfaction of closing conditions.

It will add key lifecycle management capabilities to the Citrix OpenCloud platform, making it easy for cloud providers to offer infrastructure services that extend from pre-production and quality assurance, to staging, deployment and business continuity.

The acquisition will also allow Citrix to add an intuitive, self-service interface to its popular XenServer virtualization platform – a key component of the OpenCloud framework – enabling end users to access and manage their own virtual computing resources in on-premise private cloud environments, much like they set up virtual services in large public clouds like Amazon or Rackspace today.

Citrix also announced plans to expand its OpenCloud platform to include enhanced networking and interoperability capabilities.

These new additions will include the ability for customers to seamlessly manage a mix of public and private cloud workloads from a single management console, even if they span across a variety of different cloud providers. All of these enhancements will be available to the more than 600 service providers worldwide who are now certified to deliver services based on the Citrix OpenCloud platform.

Facts and Highlights:

New additions to the Citrix OpenCloud infrastructure platform include:

  • Open Lifecycle Management – The VMLogix acquisition will add open virtual lifecycle automation and self-service capabilities that support all leading virtualization platforms. These capabilities will make it easier for IT teams to build, share and deploy production-like environments on-demand in both private and public clouds, and migrate virtual workloads between production stages with a single mouse click – even across different hypervisors. By giving users self-service access to a single pool of computing resources, cloud providers can help customers reduce capital expenses and improve flexibility, even across diverse virtualization and cloud environments.
  • Open Cloud Interoperability – To accelerate cloud interoperability, Citrix will also be integrating the Citrix OpenCloud infrastructure platform with OpenStack, the open-source orchestration and management technology it is co-developing with Rackspace, NASA, Dell, and more than 20 other leading technology and cloud service providers. The OpenStack orchestration capabilities perfectly complement the Citrix OpenCloud platform by adding key cloud management functions and enabling cloud providers to give customers open integration as well as a more consistent view of both private and public cloud workloads. In booth #1219 at this week’s VMworld conference, Citrix will be demonstrating the ability to manage workloads across XenServer virtual machines running in an on-premise private cloud, and VMs running in a public-cloud environment using OpenStack – all from a single management console.
  • Open Cloud Networking – The Citrix OpenCloud platform will also be adding powerful new virtual switching capabilities that leverage the Open vSwitch project, and support the OpenFlow protocol, an emerging industry standard that pools the resources of per-host virtual switches to create a dynamic, distributed, policy-controlled cloud fabric. These new capabilities will make it easier for cloud providers using the Citrix OpenCloud platform to create isolated, multi-tenant cloud environments, while offering dynamic, per-flow control, and per virtual-interface policies. They will also enable rich packet processing capabilities at the network edge, including the ability to leverage advanced application networking capabilities in Citrix NetScaler, another key component of the OpenCloud platform.