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Insight Venture Partners outbids Dell for Quest Software at $25.75 per share in cash

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Quest Software has accepted a sweetened $2.17-billion bid to be acquired by Insight Venture Partners (partnering with Vector Capital).

The buyout group offers stockholders $25.75 per share in cash. This increased purchase price represents a 33-percent premium to Quest’s closing stock price on the day prior to the initial announcement of the Insight Merger Agreement on March 8, 2012. Dell stopped its counter bid at $25.50 last week.

This transaction will be financed through a combination of a $187 million equity commitment from Insight, a $187 million equity commitment from Vector, a rollover of at least 84% of Quest CEO Vinny Smith’s existing shares and approximately $1.2 billion of debt financing commitments from J.P. Morgan Chase Bank N.A., RBC Capital Markets and Barclays Capital.

Quest has been on quite a Virtualization shopping spree itself over the last few years and unexpectedly bought their VKernel competitor in November 2011? Earlier acquisitions to enrich their management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments incluced Invirtus (2007) and Vizioncore (2008).

Below is our latest video interview with Scott Herold, Director, Virtualization Strategy at Quest Software, taken at VMworld Europe 2011. Prior to Quest, Scott was Vice President for Product Engineering at Invirtus and Director of R&D at Vizioncore.

Aqua Connect Sues Code Rebel, Alleging Reverse-Engineering Shenanigans

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Aqua Connect, which provides Remote Desktop Services for Mac OS X, announced today that it has filed suit against Code Rebel.

In its complaint (filed in the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, Aqua Connect basically alleges that Code Rebel has misappropriated Aqua Connect trade secrets, software and technologies since January, 2008.

Aqua Connect claims that on or around June of 2009, Code Rebel began distributing a product, iRAPP Terminal Server, which was the result of the reverse engineering of Aqua Connect Terminal Server.

“We have reason to believe that Code Rebel reversed engineered releases of Aqua Connect Terminal Server and packaged this as their own product,” said Renee Mehrian, EVP of Aqua Connect.

“This practice has caused many of our customers confusion, and for a majority of them, compromised the integrity of their servers’ security mechanisms. Our goal is to ensure that customers receive the highest quality version of Aqua Connect’s products as they were intended to be designed and released.”

Nicira Comes Out Of Stealth Mode With “Game-Changing” Network Virtualization Platform

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Backed by top-tier VCs such as Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Lightspeed Venture Partners, network virtualization company Nicira has publicly unveiled its Network Virtualization Platform (NVP), a software-based system that creates a distributed virtual network infrastructure in cloud data centers that is completely decoupled and independent from physical network hardware.

Fresh out of stealth mode, Nicira has already attracted AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace as customers.

From the official company pitch:

NVP was designed to address the shortcomings of traditional networks by offering a platform that provides the operational model of a virtual machine. While applications have been decoupled from servers through compute virtualization, they have not yet been decoupled from the network through any type of scalable network virtualization. As a result, virtualized data centers face limits to what applications they can support and where the workloads can be placed.

These limitations restrict workload mobility, thus lowering resource utilization of servers, a primary cause of operational overhead. Legacy approaches can leave as much as 20%-30% of the server capacity in data centers under utilized and drive up networking costs several fold, based on Nicira’s work with the largest cloud data center operators.

NVP forms a thin software layer that treats the physical network as an IP backplane. This approach allows the creation of virtual networks that have the same properties and services as physical networks, such as security and QoS policies, L2 reachability, and higher-level service capabilities such as stateful firewalling.

These virtual networks can be created dynamically to support VM mobility anywhere within or between data centers without service disruption or address changes.

Will people really call it the ‘VMware of networking’, then? Likely.

NVP software is delivered through a usage-based, monthly subscription-pricing model, which scales per virtual network port. Customers only pay for what they use, and pricing scales accordingly.

Nicira was founded by networking research leaders Martin Casado and Nick McKeown from Stanford University and Scott Shenker from University of California.

The company has raised $50 million in funding to date, from the aforementioned venture capital firms as well as individual investors including VMware co-founder Diane Greene and Benchmark Capital co-founder Andy Rachleff.

Red Hat Gains Gluster To Better Manage Explosion Of Big Data

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Red Hat, Inc. today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gluster, Inc., a leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for standardizing the management of unstructured data. With this $136 million cash acquisition, Red Hat tries to define a new baseline for how enterprise IT can better manages the explosion of big data, whether deployed on-premise or spanning into the public cloud. This helps Red Hat expanding into a critical part of enterprise infrastructure, enabling it to deliver open storage solutions that protect customer investments as they approach the new era of computing.

“The explosion of big data and the new paradigm of cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to re-think storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat. “Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging between the two. With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90’s paradigm of forcing everything into expensive, single-system DBMS residing on an internal corporate SAN has become unwieldy and impractical.”. Feel free to dive into the full take from Brian Steven on Gluster.

Founded in 2005, Gluster’s goal was to simplify storage using open source software and commodity hardware. The heart of Gluster is GlusterFS, a software-only, scale-out storage system. It allows enterprises to combine large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a high-performance, centrally-managed and globally-accessible storage pool. By combining commodity economics with a scale-out approach, customers can deploy abundant storage without compromising on cost, performance and manageability. Gluster has emerged as an innovative open source leader, relied upon by companies such as Pandora, Box.net and Samsung to efficiently manage large volumes of data.

“We are extremely pleased to be joining Red Hat,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. “We believe this is a perfect combination of technologies, strategies and cultures and is a great development for our customers, employees, investors and community.  Gluster started off with a goal to be the Red Hat of storage. Now, we are the storage of Red Hat.”
“Enterprises and service providers have struggled to manage their rapidly expanding unstructured data stores with conventional storage systems,” said Henry Baltazar, senior analyst of The 451 Group. “The scale out storage technology and expertise Red Hat is gaining from the acquisition of Gluster will serve as a powerful foundation for future public, private and hybrid storage clouds.”

In September 2008, Red Hat already acquired Qumranet, Inc. including its Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) platform and SolidICE offering, a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which together presented a comprehensive virtualization platform for enterprise customers. With the addition of Gluster to KVM Red Hat now seems to aim at offering a cloud platform too. Interesting times ahead in the crowded cloud market.

Red Hat has agreed to acquire Gluster, a privately-held company, for approximately $136 million in cash. As part of the transaction, Red Hat will also assume unvested Gluster equity outstanding on the closing date and issue certain equity retention incentives.  The transaction is expected to close in October, subject to customary closing conditions.

Virtual Machines in a Browser ?

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Yes we can …

When us mere mortals want to learn about a new computer language, or a new platform, we start out with the “Hello World”-variant and then try to dig in deeper…

Some people however when they want to study Javascript, raise the bar by writing optimized code for different Javascript Engines. Sharpening their skill set further by developing a JavaScript PC Emulator… That’s right, Fabrice Bellard of FFMpeg, tinycc, and Qemu fame has recently published a link to his JavaScript PC Emulator written in pure JavaScript and working in recent Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 11 browsers on different platforms.

Fabrice got his inspiration from the x86 dynamic translator code that is present in Qemu and he emulates a 32bit x86 cpu which is pretty close to a 486 without FPU.

More details on the actual emulator can be found on his web page.

Watch that space. For all you know, we’re going to be hooked on old school PC games in our browsers in the very near future…