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VKernel Scores $7 Million Series B Round

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VKernel Corporation, a provider of easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy virtual server management and optimization solutions, today announced it has closed a $7 million Series B round of funding. The latest round was led by Longworth Venture Partners and joined by prior investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners. The new funding will be used to accelerate sales, marketing, and product development efforts to capitalize on the rapidly growing server virtualization management market.

The VKernel suite of next-generation virtual server management and optimization solutions is designed to solve real world data center challenges that are impacting IT departments. VKernel leverages the virtual appliance format to instantly deploy its products for enhancing performance, lowering operational and capital costs, optimizing virtual environments of all sizes, and delivering instant ROI. Currently, VKernel supports VMware ESX and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XEN, and others. The company’s current products include:

  • Capacity Analyzer — proactively and predicatively monitor shared capacity resources to prevent current and future problems and optimize the environment
  • Chargeback — provide instant cost visibility and implement a chargeback processes
  • Modeler — quickly test and validate additions and changes to see the performance impact on the environment before going live
  • SearchMyVM — free “Google-like” search utility quickly finds information in virtual environments
  • CompareMyVM — a free community website tool allows visitors to exchange and compare virtual machine (VM) resource allocations with that of the community at large
  • SnapshotMyVM — free tool that completely automates the time-consuming process of documenting the virtual data center

Nilanjana Bhowmik, Partner at Longworth Venture Partners, and Doug McNary, the former CEO of Onaro (acquired by NetApp in 2008) and past executive vice president at Motive and Tivoli, have joined the VKernel Board of Directors.

Citrix Synergy 2009: The Highlights

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Citrix Synergy 2009 is over, and while we couldn’t attend ourselves, we’ve been closely watching the announcements that came out of the event. Here are some of the highlights, from across the web:

– “Citrix Project Independence is now XenClient and will be free” (Virtualization.info):

During his opening keynote at the Citrix Synergy 2009, Mark Templeton announced that the much discussed Project Independence (developed in collaboration with Intel) is now called XenClient, and that Citrix will offer it for free.

And from VMBlog:

– Citrix Education Announces Advanced Certifications for Virtualization and Offers Customers New Online, Hands-On Training and Practice Labs

– Citrix Upgrades Server Virtualization Product Lines for Both XenServer and Hyper-V

Citrix announced a significant new upgrade to Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, the recently announced product line that adds advanced virtualization management capabilities to two of the industry’s fastest growing virtualization platforms. The new 5.5 version of Citrix Essentials helps customers of both of these high-growth platforms achieve more manageable, scalable and agile datacenters by providing open technologies that leverage their existing investments in the most efficient way possible. Citrix also announced a new 5.5 version of Citrix XenServer that raises the bar once again for free, enterprise-class virtualization, adding a wide range of new features that enable easier management and broader integration with enterprise systems.

– Citrix Expands Citrix C3 Cloud Computing Platform and Program

Citrix Systems announced a variety of new offerings for its Citrix Cloud Center (Citrix C3) product family to further equip service providers with the infrastructure and product licensing needed to deliver successful clouds services to their customers.

– Citrix Receiver Makes Accessing Virtual Desktops and Apps as Easy as Turning on Your TV and the Receiver iPhone application is now also available in the App Store.

Citrix announced the general availability of Citrix® Receiver – a new lightweight software client that makes accessing virtual desktops and applications on any device as easy as turning on your TV. Much like a satellite or cable TV receiver in a broadcast media service, Citrix Receiver allows IT organizations to deliver desktops and applications as an on-demand service to any device in any location with a rich “high-definition” experience.

– Citrix Dazzle Puts the Personal Back in Computing

Citrix Systems took a major step toward transforming IT into an on-demand service with the introduction of Citrix Dazzle – the first self-service “storefront” for enterprise applications. Dazzle gives corporate employees 24×7 self-service access to a broad array of applications, desktops and content, allowing them to choose exactly what they need, when they need it.

AbiCloud from Abiquo

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Last month Abiquo announced the release of their “abiCloud”, an open source cloud computing platform for allowing companies to create and manage large, complex IT infrastructures (virtual servers, networks, applications, storage…) in a quick, simple and scalable way.

We had a chat with Diego Mariño, Co-founder & CEO of Abiquo , he told us that
one of the key differences of AbiCloud is the the web rich interface for managing the infrastructure. He told us “You can deploy a new service just dragging and dropping a virtual machine. This version allows to deploy instances over VirtualBox, but we support VMware, KVM and Xen too.”

As their first tester had its infrastructure on Virtualbox and because its very simple to have it up and running in different architectures that’s where their first focus is at.

Today they support Xen & KVM through libvirt, and the connectors for these hypervisors will be offered during Q2. Support for VMware, is offered to hosting providers with closed modules.

Basically, Abiquo allows to companies to convert their infrastructure into a service. Other competitors in the field include the recently founded Eucalyptus, Enomaly, and sun via it’s Qlayer acquisition.

Abiquo says it has a different focus and approach , what they are offering is the ability to create private clouds for more complex infrastructures.

The have their own open API which will be released in Q3 , with no plans to support the Amazon’s API

AbiCloud is available for Download from SF.net

Springsource Snaps Up Web App Monitoring And Management Software Maker Hyperic

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Enterprise Java house Springsource today announced it has acquired substantially all of the assets of Hyperic, the open source leader in web application and infrastructure management (see our earlier coverage). With the acquisition, SpringSource offers a comprehensive product set for powering the entire Java application lifecycle, with lean and powerful solutions for building, running and managing enterprise applications. By accelerating and unifying the application lifecycle from developer to data center and bridging the divide between development and IT operations teams, SpringSource can meet all the needs of companies building and deploying business-critical Java applications.

San Francisco-based Hyperic, provides web application performance management software that is used by numerous Fortune 1000 entities, including many of the world’s largest SaaS and consumer web companies. Hyperic’s solutions monitor and manage the performance and availability of the entire application stack from hardware and operating systems to virtual machines, web servers, application servers, databases, and more — giving IT and web operations a unified view and control of the performance and health of their entire web infrastructure.

SpringSource has a successful track record incorporating open source technologies into its offerings, creating the industry’s most comprehensive and productive solution set for the entire Java application lifecycle while supporting and contributing to the related open source communities. With the acquisition, SpringSource solutions now cover the entire application lifecycle including:

  • Build
    SpringSource leads enterprise Java innovation with Spring, the de facto standard programming model for enterprise Java applications. More than half of the Fortune 500 power their Java applications with Spring, and about two thirds of all Java developers use Spring. More than 70 percent of enterprises cite improved productivity, faster project completion, improved portability and application quality as top reasons for using Spring. SpringSource is driving even higher levels of innovation with Groovy and Grails, a dynamic language web application stack offering productivity benefits rivaling Ruby on Rails, but on a proven and scalable Spring-powered Java platform.
  • Run
    SpringSource is at the forefront of rapid enterprise adoption of lightweight application server runtimes and contributes 95 percent of bug fixes to Apache Tomcat, the most popular application server with 68 percent usage across IT organizations. SpringSource tc Server is an enterprise version of Tomcat that provides developers with the lightweight server they want paired with the operational, management and diagnostic capabilities businesses need to deploy Tomcat widely across the enterprise. SpringSource is also ensuring enterprise Java runtimes are prepared to handle virtualized and cloud computing needs with SpringSource dm Server, the leading OSGi-based Java server for modular next-generation applications.
  • Manage
    Businesses require application management and monitoring capabilities that provide deep and transparent insight into application performance and service levels as requests flow through the web servers, application servers, databases, message queues and other application infrastructure deployed on physical, virtual, and cloud computing platforms. With the addition of Hyperic, SpringSource is uniquely positioned to address modern application requirements and provide the single source of insight behind the behavior and performance of every layer of an application. Thousands of companies worldwide already depend on Hyperic for their web application and infrastructure management as well as their IT service level commitments.

“This is the marriage of two companies that share a common vision for the future of enterprise solutions and the application lifecycle. SpringSource is the default choice for many developers and IT architects creating Java applications, and Hyperic is the default choice for many IT operations professionals that need to manage those applications,” said Javier Soltero, formerly CEO of Hyperic and now CTO of Management Products at SpringSource. “Managing Enterprise Java requires visibility up and down the stack and across a company’s network and data center, including virtualization and cloud computing environments. The divide that separates development from IT operations has just become a lot smaller.”

(Via CNET)

Economy And Failure To Sell Likely To Murder Cassatt, Says CEO Bill Coleman (See Our Earlier Video Interview With The Man)

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Data center management software firm Cassatt is “close to the end,” stated founder and CEO Bill Coleman in a Forbes article. Coleman is well-known in Silicon Valley, having served as a senior exec in the early days of Sun Microsystems and as one of the co-founders of middleware company BEA systems. The ambitions with Cassatt were huge, but now (after raising $100 million in capital) the company is apparently having trouble even selling itself to one of the majors it aimed to compete with.

From the article:

“The big guys copied my story,” says Coleman. Cassatt, he adds, was upended by a slowing economy and by customers skittish about closing big orders or changing existing ways.

“What frustrates me is my own naivete,” he says. “I thought I could give companies something radical that had a proven return on investment, and they would be willing to change all their companies’ computer policies and procedures to get that. Right now it’s hard to get people to get beyond proof of concept tests or a data center energy analysis.”

And it concludes:

For his own part, though, Coleman says, “I have to think about my people. Then I’m going to a beach for a month to think about what to do next.”

We wish Coleman all the best.

Here’s a video interview we conducted with the man in the Summer of 2008:

PART 1

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PART 2

Apologies For The Radio Silence

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We would like to apologize to our readers, and particularly those who subscribe to our RSS feed and/or e-mail newsletter, for not posting any news for the past couple of days. We moved offices and it took us a while to get our internet access back. But we’re back now, and here’s an overview of what happened while we were sitting on a tropical island in no-internet-hell.

Veeam has a new CFO (William H. Largent)

BlueStripe Software raised Series B funding to the tune of $8 million from Valhalla Partners and Trinity Ventures.

CohesiveFT added both Fedora Core 10 and Internal Eucalyptus Cloud Deployment Option to its Elastic Server platform

Tranxition has announced general availability of LiveManage for Virtual Migrations 7.0

VMware has announced vSphere, its infamous cloud operating system (and then some)

rPath has announced rBuilder 5

Pano Logic has appointed Parmeet S. Chaddha as executive vice president of engineering

VMware put out their financial numbers for the first quarter of 2009

Leostream released Connection Broker 6.0

Citrix today announced that the beta release of XenServer 5.5 (code-named “Project George”) is available