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Funding

Citrix Leads $10 Million Investment In Vyatta

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Vyatta today announced it has completed its $10 million Series C round of financing led by Citrix Systems. The new funding round also includes existing investors, Comcast Interactive Capital, Panorama Capital, and ArrowPath Venture Partners. As part of the investment, Gordon Payne, senior vice president and general manager of the Delivery Systems Division at Citrix, has joined the Vyatta Board of Directors where he will assist the company in its next phase of development.

Today, Vyatta also announced that it has joined the Citrix Ready product verification program to create solutions for customers deploying cloud computing infrastructures.

Vyatta will use the funds for operating capital as the company scales its sales efforts and accelerates growth across multiple markets.

Vyatta runs on standard x86 hardware and can be virtualized with modern hypervisors, including the Citrix XenServer™ virtualization platform. Vyatta delivers a full set of networking features that allow customers to connect, protect, virtualize, and optimize their networks, improving performance, reducing costs, and increasing manageability and flexibility over proprietary networking solutions. Vyatta has been deployed by hundreds of customers world-wide in both virtual and non-virtual environments.

NextIO Raises $15 Million In Fourth Round Of Financing

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NextIO today announced that the company has received a $15 million round of Series D funding. NextIO is the industry leader in providing intelligent, rack-optimized I/O virtualization (IOV) solutions based on high-performance PCI Express (PCIe) switching technology.

NextIO received support not only from existing VCs and strategic investors, but participation from new strategic investment sources as well. The new funding will be used to expand NextIO’s sales, marketing and support and will allow the company to accelerate the delivery of its second-generation of Express Connect products.

Through I/O virtualization, NextIO products deliver an unprecedented combination of low cost, lower power consumption, greater ease of use, and greatly reduced maintenance requirements. For example, server rollouts that previously required days or weeks can be accomplished in less than 30 minutes, and routine server maintenance time is reduced from hours to minutes.

NextIO’s second-generation products build on the success of the company’s existing Express Connect products, which are at revenue and are currently being deployed in the U.S. and Europe. NextIO solutions are currently in use in a number of different markets for applications such as simulation, adding graphic processors to commodity computing environments, expanding I/O, speeding up existing I/O, and delivering new data center technologies.

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.

Eucalyptus Set To Launch With $5.5 Million In Series A Funding

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Eucalyptus Systems, creators of an open source private cloud platform, today announced that it has closed a $5.5 million Series A round of venture financing led by Benchmark Capital with BV Capital also participating.

The funding marks the launch of Eucalyptus Systems as a private company that will build and service enterprise-grade products based on the Eucalyptus open source privatecloud software. Eucalyptus Systems’ mission is to support the open source Eucalyptus cloud platform and to deliver on-premise private and hybrid cloud computing solutions for large-scale enterprise deployments.

Eucalyptus is an open source software infrastructure for implementing on-premise cloud computing using an organization’s own information technology (IT) infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration. Eucalyptus turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a “cloud” that is controlled and customized by local IT. Moreover, a local cloud based on Eucalyptus adds capabilities such as end-user customization, self-service provisioning, and legacy application support to data center virtualization features, making IT customer service easier, more fully featured, and less expensive.

Eucalyptus is the only cloud architecture to support the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as public clouds, and today Eucalyptus is fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure. The Eucalyptus design gives users the flexibility to seamlessly move applications from on-premise Eucalyptus clouds to public clouds, and vice versa. Eucalyptus also makes it easy to deploy “hybrid” clouds, which use public and private cloud resources together to get the unique benefits of each. To assist customers with setup, deployment, training, and support, Eucalyptus Systems has created the QuickStart program, the ideal first step for organizations looking to partner with Eucalyptus experts on critical cloud infrastructure initiatives.

The Eucalyptus management team includes Co-founder and CEO Woody Rollins, Co-founder and CTO Dr. Rich Wolski, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Matt Reid, and the team of Ph.D. computer science engineers from the Eucalyptus project at UCSB. In addition, Andreas Von Blottnitz, former CEO of AOL Europe and Citrix Online, is chairman of the board, and Dr. Klaus Schauser, founder of AppFolio and founder and CTO of Citrix Online, is serving as an advisor.

To date, Eucalyptus has been downloaded over 14,000 times in 72 countries. In addition, Eucalyptus software is the cloud computing engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (powered by Eucalyptus), which was recently announced as part of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Eucalyptus will ship with every copy of Ubuntu, starting with the Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition, made available on April 23.

FastScale Lands $5.5 million Series B Financing

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FastScale Technology today announced that it has secured $5.5 million in a Series B funding round led by ATA Ventures and joined by prior investors Leapfrog Ventures, Hunt Ventures as well as a new strategic corporate investor. The company’s last round of financing occurred in late 2006, shortly before the launch of their flagship product, FastScale Composer Suite.

FastScale’s technology enables data centers to respond to constantly changing business requirements, server workloads, and server hardware with a server software platform that dramatically increases agility while significantly reducing day-to-day operating complexity and cost – whether the data center is virtualized, not virtualized or a hybrid of the two. The ground-breaking technology is the only solution on the market to fully automate the process of building, managing and deploying heterogeneous server software environments with compact software environments built on-demand, automatic patch and configuration management, lightweight provisioning in only seconds, and an enterprise-class repository for lifecycle management.

FastScale software environments average 95% smaller than traditional images, dramatically decrease memory requirements, and increase virtual server density by 300% or more. With FastScale’s solution, the entire server infrastructure, both physical and virtual, is a dynamic pool of resources able to adapt to constantly changing demands.

“FastScale’s approach to the growing issue of software complexity is breakthrough technology for data centers,” said Hatch Graham, managing director at ATA Ventures. “The technology provides an elegant way for enterprises to manage the complexity while increasing server consolidation and decreasing cost. We’ve seen what FastScale has done for customers, and it’s impressive. We look forward to working with the FastScale team to help drive the next stage of company growth.”

Reflex Systems Bags $8.5 Million in Series A Funding

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Reflex Systems today announced that it has secured $8.5 million in Series A funding lead by RFA Management Company, an Atlanta based private investment firm.

The deal marks the final step in the reorganization of Reflex Security Inc. by creating a new Georgia limited liability company, Reflex Systems LLC. Reflex Systems is exclusively focused on virtual management and security software solutions. The company’s award winning Reflex VMC (Virtualization Management Center) product provides the industry’s most comprehensive management solution with dynamic policy enforcement across the entire virtual datacenter, whether the virtual resources are hosted locally, remotely, or in a cloud environment.

“This funding is testament to the innovation that our management and security solutions are delivering to the rapidly growing virtualization market,” said Pete Privateer, CEO of Reflex Systems. “Organizations are investing in virtual infrastructure to streamline costs and operations during these extraordinary economic times. Likewise, the demand for tools to automate the management and security of virtual datacenters is a rapidly emerging market creating significant growth opportunities for Reflex.”