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Funding

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.

VirtualLogix Raises More Funding, Won’t Say How Much

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VirtualLogix today announced that it has secured a new round of financing, which will be used primarily to accelerate the company’s growth in the mobile virtualization segment.

The financing included a new investor, Progression Partners, as well as the existing venture capital investors Atlas Venture, Index Ventures and DFJ Esprit; and strategic investors Intel Capital, Motorola Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm of Motorola, and Texas Instruments.

Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.

According to CrunchBase, VirtualLogix had raised just south of $30 million over the past 5 years.

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.

Bridgescale Partners Injects $11 Million Into BlueCat Networks

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Bridgescale Partners, a California-based investment firm, has led a U.S. $11 million minority investment in Toronto-based BlueCat Networks, a provider of enterprise-class IP Address Management (IPAM) platforms.

Having just completed a record sales quarter, BlueCat Networks will use its first institutional venture capital round to further enhance its award-winning product line and continue the rapid expansion of its global distribution network.

Recognizing network administrators are now facing a variety of external and internal pressures including the introduction of VoIP, wireless devices (including RFID tags), IT virtualization, and the complexity IPv6 brings to the network, BlueCat Networks provides automated solutions that simplify network processes while still enabling enterprises to take advantage of the latest technologies.

Bridgescale, which has announced plans to expand into Canada, has significant experience working with Canadian entrepreneurs and companies and is currently an investor in Cortina, a semiconductor company with a large development center in Ottawa and Proofpoint, which also has a presence in Toronto based on its acquisition of Fortiva.

Virtustream Raises $25 Million Equity Financing

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Virtustream a privately held infrastructure services firm, today announced the completion of new equity financing with total commitments of $25 million led by Virginia based Columbia Capital and Miami based Blue Lagoon Capital.

Virtustream is an infrastructure services firm committed to helping clients actualize the enterprise cloud by providing strategy, integration and managed services leveraging deep virtualization experience, and its own proprietary platform. The infusion of funding is part of Virtustream’s growth strategy and will be used to continue accelerating its platform development, build international presence and expand domain expertise.

Virtustream also recently completed the acquisition of VirtualizeIT, the premier European consultancy practice dedicated to the advancement and adoption of virtualization technologies, and Brigh Technologies (Brigh), the leading North American provider for the design and deployment of custom solutions in the virtualization space. The union brings together pioneers in enterprise computing including being one of the first VMware professional services partners in North America and the 2008 VMware EMEA Partner of the Year. The stockholders of both acquired companies will have an equity interest in Virtustream, and all employees will continue their employment with Virtustream.

Icomasoft Raises Series A Funding From ZKB

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Icomasoft AG today announced the securing of funding from Zurich Cantonal Bank (ZKB). The co-founders keep the majority of the company’s common stock shares. The funds are devoted to commercializing the company’s leading-edge software solutions that rapidly and efficiently address automation, management and compliance requirements of companies operating a virtual IT.

icomasoft’s software enables IT administrators to achieve a better control of their virtual IT infrastructure through a very high degree of automation and integration of 3rd party management software into their favorite virtual infrastructure platform.

Thanks to icomasoft’s unique approach of cross-platform integration and automation, customers can quickly restore transparency across their datacenter and experience an immediate and substantial reduction of their operating cost and an increased IT compliance through reduction of human errors in their daily routine processes.

icomasoft has already secured strong partnerships with global technology and market leaders, such as VMware, Network Appliance, Microsoft and Citrix and experiences an increasing demand for integrated automation and management solutions restoring transparency between virtual and physical IT environments.