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Funding

Ziften Launches With $5.8 Million In Series A Funding

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Ziften Technologies has officially launched and announced a $5.8 million Series A round of funding that has fueled the company’s growth since its origin in early 2010.

Ziften focuses on enterprise system efficiency, introducing software dedicated to improving endpoint efficiency, user productivity, and device service lifetimes way beyond traditional desktop management by increasing Quality of Service (QoS) across all endpoints within an enterprise.

Ziften’s software directs and reallocates computing resources to the applications of highest business value, benefiting the enterprise, employees, and IT.

Ziften closed $5.8 Million Series A funding from Fayez Sarofim & Co. and Trellis Partners.

Ziften executives bring together experience from technology’s most regarded brands: Akami, AMD, Cisco, Dell, Intel, and CalTech. Most notably, this team worked together as the founders of WholeSecurity, an enterprise security leader snapped up by Symantec in 2005.

Product details will be announced shortly.

CopperEgg Raises $2M, Bring Real-Time Analytics To The Cloud With RevealCloud

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CopperEgg has announced that it has secured $2 million in Series A funding and launched RevealCloud, a SaaS-based performance monitoring solution that helps companies accelerate the delivery of applications and services across public and private clouds.

RevealCloud is the latest addition to CopperEgg’s suite of real-time performance monitoring solutions, including RevealStorage, launched earlier this year to help IT organizations optimize the efficiency of critical datacenter resources.

Silverton Partners led the first-round investment in the company, which includes the appointments of Kip McClanahan and Morgan Flager to CopperEgg’s board of directors.

The company is led by software industry veteran CEO Scott Johnson, founder of Thomas-Conrad Corporation (acquired by Compaq Computer in 1995) and Surgient Networks (acquired by Quest Software in 2010).

RevealCloud provides split-second monitoring of the operating and performance metrics of cloud instances that support critical application services, enabling customers to accelerate time to market during the development phase, optimize deployments as they learn customer usage patterns, and identify early warning signals of service degradation.

RevealCloud standard edition is available for free install. Advanced features will be available on a tiered-pricing basis for a monthly subscription.

Piston Cloud Computing Scores $4.5 Million In Funding For Open Source Cloud

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Piston Cloud Computing, a software company developing commercialized OpenStack software for businesses, has raised $4.5 million in funding in a round led by Hummer Winblad and True Ventures, with Divergent Ventures and others participating.

Lars Leckie from Hummer Winblad, and Puneet Agarwal from True Ventures will join Piston’s board of directors.

Launched by NASA and Rackspace in 2010, OpenStack is the fastest-growing open-source project in the world, with over 1,100 contributors and 82 participating companies, including Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Intel, Cisco, Arista Networks and Dell.

Piston’s co-founders actually came from the technical teams at NASA and Rackspace, and helped to create the OpenStack project in 2010.

Piston’s CEO, Joshua McKenty, was the Cloud Architect of NASA’s Nebula Cloud infrastructure, the precursor of OpenStack’s cloud computing component, and holds an appointed seat on OpenStack’s Policy Board.

Piston’s CTO, Christopher MacGown, was a Technical Lead at SliceHost, acquired by Rackspace in 2008. In addition, the team has recruited some of the best talent from the OpenStack community, including core contributors from NASA and other participating organizations.

Piston Cloud technology is currently in limited beta, with a public release expected in Q4 2011.

Virtustream Raises $10 Million Series B Round

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Virtustream, a provider of cloud services and next generation infrastructure solutions, has landed $10 million of Series B round financing to complement the company’s previous Series A round for a total of $59 million in equity capital raised to date.

Virtustream’s Series B funding comes from existing investors: Intel Capital, Columbia Capital, Noro-Moseley Partners, and TDFunds.

Virtustream will use the proceeds from this new capital raise to productize its internal cloud provisioning platform, xStream, into a distributable end “cloud O/S” software product.

This will allow customers to purchase the xStream software to place atop their own infrastructure assets to gain the unique efficiencies of xStream’s infrastructure provisioning architecture. It will also allow Virtustream to be a channel partner for service providers such as Telecommunications Carriers and Systems Integrators to facilitate the development of their cloud solutions.

Virtustream will also invest resources in the branding, marketing and advertising of its products and services, and in expanding its market presence in San Francisco and London.

Finally, Virtustream will invest in growing its Cloud Advisory Services group, which supports enterprise clientele in a consultative manner to help them determine optimal cloud adoption and migration strategies.

Spring Mountain, RRE Ventures Invest In WhipTail Technologies

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Spring Mountain Capital, a New York-based investment management firm led the Series A Preferred Stock financing for WhipTail Technologies, an independent manufacturer of solid state-storage arrays designed to improve the scalability and performance of applications, such as virtualization, databases and email. RRE Ventures also participated in the round.

Financing terms were not disclosed.

With the investment, Spring Mountain Capital and its affiliates have become a majority investor in WhipTail. In conjunction with the financing, SMC Managing Directors Raymond Wong, Avi Faliks and Jamie Weston have joined the company’s Board of Directors.

WhipTail will use the financing to accelerate the expansion of the its sales and marketing efforts as well as support additional product development. Sales efforts are being ramped up in the U.S. and Europe through the hiring of sales teams, the development of key strategic partnerships, enhancement of the company’s reseller channels and provisioning of key marketing support to that channel.

Flash Virtualization Company FlashSoft Secures $3 Million

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FlashSoft, the ‘Flash Virtualization Company’, launched with the announcement of its Series A funding of $3 million, led by Thomvest Ventures, and the introduction of the first commercial offering of software to enable enterprise flash as a cost-effective, server-tier computing resource.

The company’s product, called FlashSoft SE, is commercially available today and is already being used in business-critical production environments by several customers. FlashSoft SE is available for free evaluation through a 30-day “Try Before You Buy” program.

Flash technology has gained traction in enterprise computing due to its ability to reduce input/output (IO) latency, and to increase scalability and performance for databases, enterprise applications and virtualization environments.

Despite the performance advantages of flash SSD, two barriers have inhibited its adoption in the enterprise. First, when used as primary data storage, flash memory cannot easily integrate with and leverage the benefits of existing storage systems infrastructure. Secondly, storing all of an application’s data on server-attached flash memory remains expensive.

FlashSoft SE is the first commercially available, all-software “tier minus one” solution for Flash Virtualization.

Enterprise IT can now provide databases, applications and virtual machine environments with the performance benefit of having the entire data set on flash, with only a fraction of the data actually stored in flash. This innovation makes enterprise flash a cost-effective performance solution that works seamlessly with existing storage infrastructure.

FlashSoft SE is a software solution that automatically identifies and caches the most frequently used data — hot data — on any SSD in the server. This capability, called Active Data Management, enables flash SSD to be applied to the computing operations in which it can provide the greatest benefit, eliminating IO latency that holds back application and virtualization scale and performance.

FlashSoft SE for Windows Server is available for evaluation and purchase now. Pricing is based on the number of servers accelerated and types of SSDs employed.

FlashSoft SE for Linux is currently in Beta testing.