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Unidesk Scores $12 Million In Series B Round

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Unidesk, provider of virtual desktop management software, today announced it has secured $12 million in Series B venture capital funding. The round was led by Series A investors Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners, and underscores the potential both see in Unidesk to become the dominant, hypervisor-independent provisioning and management platform for desktop virtualization.

Unidesk offers all the complementary capabilities needed to make a VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, or heterogeneous Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment usable for end users, manageable for IT and affordable for the enterprise, including operating system provisioning and patching; application packaging and delivery; user profile and personalization management; and, storage reduction.

Unidesk will use the new investment to continue its disciplined growth, in which spending will accelerate in parallel with sales success, leading toward a profitable, long term business model.

CORAID Announces $10 Million Series A Funding, New Executives

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CORAID, a developer of scale-out storage with more than 1,100 customers worldwide, today announced that it has closed a $10 million Series-A financing round with Allegis Capital and Azure Capital Partners to accelerate the development and adoption of the CORAID EtherDrive storage platform.

With this funding, the company has named multiple Silicon Valley veterans to its executive team, including: Kevin Brown as CEO, Audrey MacLean as chairman of the board, Carl Wright as executive vice president of worldwide sales, and Josh Leslie as vice president of channels and business development. Lara Druyan of Allegis Capital and Paul Weinstein of Azure Capital Partners have joined CORAID’s board of directors; Mark Leslie and Charles Giancarlo have joined the advisory board and invested in the company.

CORAID is redefining the fundamental economics of storage with its Ethernet-based solutions that provide enterprises of all sizes with a flexible tier of high performance, scale-out storage. CORAID’s breakthrough EtherDrive storage platform has organically amassed over 1,100 customers, including large enterprise and government organizations, since its 2005 launch into the Linux market.

Using innovative software with 100-percent commodity hardware and raw Ethernet, EtherDrive storage arrays enable a scale-out SAN architecture that is ideally suited to dynamic virtualization and cloud environments. Starting at under $500 per terabyte and scaling to multiple petabytes, EtherDrive delivers a 5-8x price performance advantage over legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI solutions, while eliminating layers of complex SAN management.

This announcement coincides with the completion of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) deployment of CORAID’s EtherDrive solution in its storage network to support high-performance computing for the National Human Genome Research project. Located in Rockville, Maryland, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is leading a nationwide effort to coordinate and accelerate human genome research. NHGRI has deployed more than 400 terabytes of CORAID EtherDrive storage in multiple environments, including high-performance computing, primary storage, and backup. The EtherDrive installation supports applications including DNA sequencing, bio-informatics, and data reduction.

Veeam Appoints VMware’s Daniel Fried To Managing Director for EMEA

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Veeam Software, provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today announced the promotion of Daniel Fried to managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Fried joined Veeam from VMware, where he was Director, Partner Sales, Southern EMEA.

“Daniel has spent the past 20 years creating and nurturing international high-tech companies, such as VMware, Alcatel and Philips,” explained George Sidoris, Veeam Software Vice President of Worldwide Sales. “His promotion follows on the heels of his excellent work and Veeam’s extraordinary growth in Europe. Despite the economic crisis, Veeam grew by 130 percent in Europe between 2008 and 2009.”Fried began his career with Veeam Software in 2008 when he launched the company’s French subsidiary in Paris and assumed leadership of the Southern EMEA region. In 2009 he expanded his responsibilities to build and supervise the Central Europe region for Veeam.

In little more than a year, Fried and his team have created a network of more than 1,000 partners in Europe, enabling Veeam to make a substantial impact on the small and medium business market and win a significant number of large enterprise accounts.

VMware Announces Availability of VMware Go

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VMware today announced the availability of VMware Go, a web-based service that allows small or medium businesses (SMBs) to virtualize servers and create running virtual machines with just a few clicks of a mouse.

VMware Go provides SMBs with an easy on-ramp to virtualizing their applications by automating the installation and configuration of hypervisor VMware ESXi.

VMware Go has already successfully created over three-thousand virtual machines for over one-thousand beta testers. VMware Go together with VMware ESXi provides companies with a quick way to reduce overhead and simplify business operations by running multiple operating systems and applications on a single server – spending less money on hardware, power and cooling, and server administration.

VMware Go Simplifies and Accelerates Virtualization In Three Simple Steps:

1. Initial ESXi server setup

  • Unique web-browser interface and intuitive wizard guides and accelerates installation and setup process
  • Built in hardware compatibility check automates the process of selecting physical server environments

2. Virtual machine creation

  • Leverage existing physical server configuration, install a prebuilt virtual appliance, or start with a new, clean virtual machine.

3. Manage ESXi servers and virtual machines

  • Centralized management interface simplifies changes to a virtual environment.
  • Monitor virtual machines for basic performance and resource utilization.
  • Scan and update virtual machines from a central console.

IDC: Worldwide Server Market Stabilizes in Third Quarter, Improvement Ahead

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According to IDC‘s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market declined 17.3% year over year to $10.4 billion in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09).

Although this is the fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue decline, the market grew sequentially for the first time since 4Q08. Server unit shipments declined 17.9% year over year in 3Q09, a significant improvement over the 30.1% year-over-year decline experienced in 2Q09, but grew a healthy 12.4% quarter over quarter – the largest sequential unit growth since 2005.

All three server segments – volume, midrange enterprise, and high-end enterprise – experienced year-over-year revenue decline in 3Q09, marking the fourth consecutive quarter in which this has happened. However, the market for volume servers improved sequentially in the quarter as demand is returning to the low end of the market. Volume systems revenue declined 14.7% year over year in the third quarter, the smallest decline for this important market segment since 3Q08. Revenue for midrange enterprise servers declined 23.4% year over year while revenue for high-end enterprise servers declined 19.3% year over year.

IBM and HP ended the third quarter in a statistical tie with 31.8% and 30.9% of overall factory revenue market share respectively. IBM’s overall factory revenues declined 12.9% year over year helped in part by healthy System x and System p sales. HP experienced a 16.8% year-over-year factory revenue decline in 3Q09. Dell experienced a 6.8% revenue decline and maintained third place with 13.5% overall market share in 3Q09, helped in part by strong server sales growth from its Datacenter Solutions business unit.

Sun maintained its fourth place position by posting a 35.0% year-over-year revenue decline and holding 7.5% market share for the quarter as many customers wait for additional product roadmap detail following Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun. Fujitsu maintained its fifth-place standing in terms of factory revenue, with 5.7% market share in the quarter, an improvement over its 3Q08 market position.

Top-Level Server Market Findings

  • Microsoft Windows server revenue was $4.5 billion in 3Q09 showing a 12.8% year-over-year decline and comprising 43.0% of all server revenue in the quarter. Windows servers account for the single largest segment, by operating system, in the worldwide server market.
  • Linux server revenue declined 12.6% year over year to $1.5 billion in the quarter. Linux servers now represent 14.8% of all server revenue, up slightly from 14.0% a year ago.
  • Unix servers experienced a 23.4% revenue decline when compared with 3Q08. Worldwide Unix revenues were $2.8 billion for the quarter, representing 26.9% of quarterly server spending. IBM gained 5.1 points of share year over year and holds the 3Q09 leadership position, posting 39.5% share in this segment, followed by Hewlett Packard (29.2%) and Sun Microsystems (23.4%) respectively, based on factory revenue.

x86 server factory revenue declined 12.3% year over year in 3Q09 to $6.1 billion. However, x86 factory revenues increased a healthy 18.7% when compared with 2Q09. This is the largest sequential improvement in x86 server revenue in nearly 5 years (since 4Q05). On a year-over-year comparative basis, shipments also continued to slip when compared to 2008 market highs, dropping 17.0% to 1.6 million units. HP led the market with 37.7% factory revenue share as Dell held second place with 23.2% factory revenue share and IBM maintained the third position with 18.5% factory revenue share. Overall, IBM exhibited the strongest x86 performance of the top 3 OEMs, gaining 2.5 points of market share on a 1.2% improvement in year-over-year factory revenue.

After two consecutive quarters of declining year-over-year revenues, the blade server market segment returned to quarterly revenue growth with factory revenue increasing 1.2% year over year on a 14.0% year-over-year shipment decline. Overall, bladed servers, including x86, EPIC, and RISC blades, accounted for $1.4 billion in the third quarter, representing 13.6% of quarterly server revenue. IBM exhibited the strongest blade server performance of the top 5 OEMs, gaining 6.0 points of market share on 27.2% year-over-year factory revenue growth. HP led the market with 50.7% revenue share as IBM held second place with 29.4% revenue share and Dell maintained the third position with 8.9% revenue share.

Cloud Testing Provider SOASTA Raises $10 Million Series C Round

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SOASTA today announced the successful close of $10 million in Series C funding as it prepares its global expansion.

The round was led by UV Partners, and included participation from all existing investors: Canaan Partners, Formative Ventures and The Entrepreneurs’ Fund. The company’s growth plan includes the opening of offices in Europe, broadening of the reseller channel and increasing its technology roadmap with product enhancements to address the growing demand for SOASTA’s cloud-based testing service.

Today’s announcement follows other significant company milestones. SOASTA recently announced a new partnership with Computer Sciences Corporation , a managed services provider, who has integrated CloudTest into its Trusted Cloud Services offering and its testing and development methodology. The company completed large web-scale tests with Best Buy, Hallmark, Leapfrog, M-Dot Networks, MySpace, Schlumberger, SAP and Zappos.com, and also announced open source support by offering JMeter users the ability to run their scripts in the SOASTA Global Test Cloud.

With the closing of the Series C funding, SOASTA adds Blake Modersitzki, managing director, UV Partners, to its board of directors.

SOASTA CloudTest On-Demand is a full-service offering. Customers simply describe the web user business process, such as logging into an account, executing a transaction, or browsing content. SOASTA’s team of experienced performance engineers build the tests, provision the complete cloud environment, execute the tests, and work with customers to analyze, fix and tune a site’s performance. SOASTA CloudTest’s unique, real-time metrics and analytics of massive test results data gives customers the performance intelligence they need to pinpoint and fix issues as tests are being run — ensuring greater confidence in website reliability and performance.