Funding

ScaleMP Raises $8 Million More, Funding Now Totals $26 Million (Oh Yeah, They Also Launched)

April 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Cupertino-based ScaleMP, a provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, today announced that it has raised $8 million in new venture funding, bringing the total raised to $26 million. Participation in this up-round funding included all of the existing investors: Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, TL Ventures, and ABS Ventures. This announcement coincides with the official launch of the company and its technology, whose details have also been announced today.

The ScaleMP aggregation technology allows a server to expand outside a single system boundary, addressing growing end-user requirements for large memory systems or systems with high-core count. The vSMP Foundation aggregation platform is a software-only solution that eliminates the need for extensive R&D or proprietary hardware components in developing high-end x86 systems, and reduces overall end-user system cost and operational expenditures. It utilizes up to sixteen x86 systems to create a single shared-memory system with 4 to 32 processors (128 cores) and up to 1 TB of RAM, providing significantly better price/performance compared to traditional SMP systems and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared to clusters.

The ScaleMP product line includes two products: a standalone solution, which enables the industry’s first four-socket system at under $10,000, and an embedded solution that helps original design manufacturers (ODMs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) build high-end systems.

The ScaleMP solutions are sold through a worldwide network of partners. The vSMP Foundation Standalone is available through VARs and system integrators at prices starting at US$2,750. vSMP Foundation Embedded is available through ODMs and OEMs at prices that vary depending on system configuration.

[Source: AmericanVentureMagazine]

Gear6 Raises $ 10 Million from Horizon Ventures, US Venture Partners and InterWest Partners

March 27, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Mountain View-based Gear6 today announced it has secured a $ 10 million financing round led by Horizon Ventures. Existing investors U.S. Venture Partners and InterWest Partners also participated in the round. The closing of this financing round brings the total capital invested in Gear6 to $24.5 million.

Gear6 accelerates I/O for real-time application performance and delivers centralized caching solutions in the data center. It’s most notable product is CACHEfx, a line of appliances that deliver high I/O operations per second and extremely low latency to accelerate the performance of data intensive applications, integrating both a hardware and software solution.

“We are pleased to welcome Horizon Ventures as an investor in Gear6,‘ said Tom Shea, president and chief executive officer. ‘The market for our CACHEfx scalable caching appliances is poised for significant growth and this financing round gives us the opportunity to meet increasing demand for centralized caching solutions across key markets including performance computing, databases, business intelligence, web-scale and virtualized environments.”

[Source: Ad-Hoc-News]

Layered Technologies Secures $ 11 Million in Private Investment

March 12, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Layered Technologies has secured $11 million in funding from private equity firm Enhanced Equity Fund and its founding investor Pangloss International. The new cash will provide Layered Technologies with working capital to expand, develop new products, and accelerate sales and marketing efforts within new enterprise markets.

Layered Technologies is a provider of on-demand hosting, utility computing solutions and web services with clients in over 120 countries. The Texas-based company offers a grid hosting service as well as virtual private data centers.

“We see great potential for Layered Technologies to play a key role in shaping the future of grid computing and virtualized services within the hosting marketplace,” said David Howe, Managing General Partner for Enhanced Equity Fund.

[Source: Data Center Knowledge]

NextIO Raises $ 18.8 Million In Series C Funding For Virtualizing Server Communication

March 2, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Austin-based connectivity virtualization developer NextIO announced Friday that it had raised $ 18.8 million in a third round series as the five-year-old company prepares to launch its first products to enable distributed computing systems to connect and communicate using any of a variety of technology standards.

The deal was led by Crescendo Ventures and Adams Capital Management, and included previous investors JK&B Capital, the VentureTech Alliance arm of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., and Dell, as well as two new strategic investors. The new funding brings total equity investment in NextIO to about $ 40 million and will allow the company to launch its first commercial products with original equipment manufacturers (OEM) partners in the second quarter of this year.

NextIO co-founder and CEO K.C. Murphy said the company made its first switch products available to customers in late 2007 but will launch its primary appliance product in April, in conjunction with new products introduced by OEM partners. The products are aimed at bringing the same advantages of virtualization to connectivity technology that developers including VMWare, Microsoft and the open source Xensource platform have brought to the server market.

NextIO’s product virtualizes I/O functions to bring high-performance computing capabilities to clustered systems of commodity servers. The products enable individual server connectivity using any of the several available connectivity standards with systems level technology that controls connectivity within a virtual “cloud.”

[Source: TechConfidential]

Incipient Raises $ 15.6 Million Venture Capital Funding In Series E

February 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Incipient, a provider of enterprise-class storage virtualization and automated data migration software solutions, announced today that it has closed a $15.6 million Series E round of funding from existing investors including Globespan Capital Partners, GrandBanks Capital, HLM Venture Partners, Greylock, QuestMark Partners, Sigma Partners, and Wasatch Advisors, as well as a new investor.

Incipient says it will use this new funding to expand global sales and marketing initiatives for its enterprise-class award winning storage virtualization and automated data migration software solutions now being used by leading financial services organizations to automate and virtualize their data center operations.

“We are pleased with the continued steadfast support and confidence of this storage-savvy investor group participating in this latest round of funding,” said Ric Calvillo, CEO and co-founder of Incipient. “Over the last year we have seen a dramatic increase in customer traction and interest in both our storage virtualization and automated data migration solutions within the financial services market segment. We see this interest accelerating globally over the upcoming year as we uniquely address the desire by large financial services accounts to automate and virtualize data center operations to manage complexities associated with storage growth and business service requirements.”

“The need to automate and virtualize data center operations is a top priority for global financial services entities and Incipient is uniquely well-positioned to capitalize on this rapidly evolving market opportunity,” said Bill Helman, general partner, Greylock. “We look forward to working with and continuing to support Incipient as they execute on the major market opportunity they are now prepared to exploit with their enterprise-class solutions.”

[Source: VMBlog]

Another Day, Another Funding Deal: VirtenSys Raises 8.1 Million Euro

January 31, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

UK-based virtualization company VirtenSys has secured a Series B funding round to the tune of € 8.1 million (USD 12 million). The syndicate consists of existing shareholders Scottish Equity Partners, Celtic House Venture Partners and the Belgian GIMV. VirtenSys will use the new funds to expand operations in the UK and US, and to launch its products and begin revenue generation.

“That the original investors subscribed fully to the Series B round is significant,” said Andy Roberts, chairman of the board of directors of VirtenSys. “It validates our strategy and demonstrates their confidence in the market opportunity and the demand for our products.”

VirtenSys is developing I/O virtualization solutions for data centers. VirtenSys’ technology enables data centers to better adapt to dynamic workloads, self-configure, and self-heal at a lower total cost of ownership and higher utilization than currently available systems.

VirtenSys predicts a growing demand for its solutions as workloads on data centers keep increasing and the dynamics of the IT workload are changing. According to the company these dynamics call for greater corporate agility in response to changing business conditions and require an IT infrastructure that can adapt equally fast. Organizations are trying to find new ways to increase data center utilization while reducing the total cost of ownership. This again requires greater dynamism in the management of the IT workload.

VirtenSys’ strategy is to protect IT investments with a standards-compliant migration path for servers to virtualized I/O resources. The I/O virtualization solutions are based on the industry-standard PCI Express I/O interface which is natively available on all servers.

Stuart Paterson, a partner at lead investor SEP said, “SEP is confident that VirtenSys has an excellent future. Virtualization is very much at the top of CIO agendas. VirtenSys virtualization solutions increase utilization, while lowering power and cooling requirements by as much as 50 percent. This is very attractive to many organizations seeking to optimize their data centers.”

Just recently, VirtenSys appointed a new CEO (Ahmet Houssein ), a new chairman (Andrew Roberts ), expanded its sales and engineering executive teams and opened its US headquarters in Oregon. The company was founded in December 2005 and raised its first round of funding in October 2006. Scottish Equity Partners, Celtic House Venture Partners and GIMV then invested a total of €9.5 million.

[Via Tornado-Insider ]

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