News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing
XtremIO, developer of storage solutions based on Solid State technology, has announced that it has secured a $14 million financing round led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors Giza Venture Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).
XtremIO will apply the capital to accelerate product engineering and deliver its solution to the enterprise storage market.
At the end of last month, VMware announced the acquisition of Socialcast, a provider of social collaboration solutions for the enterprise.
Socialcast enables modern business communication by “uniting people, information and enterprise applications within collaborative communities”.
Delivered as a hosted service, private cloud implementation, or via an on-premise solution, Socialcast is used by some of the world’s largest enterprises including Avaya, Humana, Nokia, Philips Electronics, SAS and … VMware.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Socialcast joins the recent acquisitions of SlideRocket and Zimbra, along with the introduction of VMware Horizon App Manager, in helping advance VMware’s vision for a modern end-user computing model.
Citrix Systems recently announced that it has acquired Kaviza, makers of an all-in-one “VDI-in-a-Box” solution for small and medium business. It complements the company’s XenDesktop product line for enterprise-class desktop virtualization.
Kaviza VDI-in-a-Box is not just a scaled-down enterprise product, but instead gives SMB customers everything they need to “go virtual” with VDI in a single, easy-to-deploy software virtual appliance.
Customers can continue to purchase VDI-in-a-box from Kaviza resellers. Starting July 1, 2011 customers will also be able to buy from Citrix Solution Advisors.
Citrix will soon be rolling out a new OpenStack product that would let customers build private or public clouds. The company has added Project Olympus, a new cloud product, to its open cloud computing portfolio to complement its Citrix NetScaler Cloud Gateway and NetScaler Cloud Bridge.
Citrix Systems announced Project Olympus, a new cloud infrastructure product based on the open-source cloud operating system OpenStack, at Citrix Synergy a few weeks ago. It will be the first commercialized version of OpenStack and will begin shipping later this year, Citrix said.
Based on OpenStack, Project Olympus will help customers build real infrastructure-as-a-service clouds that are scalable, efficient and open by design because they use the same architecture, approach and technology behind “some of today’s largest and most successful clouds in the world,” Citrix added.
Project Olympus will be composed of two components, a Citrix-certified version of OpenStack and a cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer. It will support a wide range of infrastructure, management and development technologies to make it easy for customers to expand and build on the platform, Citrix said.
Project Olympus will also support Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere in addition to Citrix XenDesktop.
OpenStack began as a joint effort between Rackspace and NASA back in July 2010. The effort has since expanded to include more than 70 industry partners, including Citrix. OpenStack supports multiple virtualization hypervisor platforms, including Hyper-V, KVM and Xen.
Gluster, provider of open source storage solutions for private and public clouds, today announced Mike Backlund has joined the company as senior vice president of sales. He will be responsible for driving both domestic and international sales.
Prior to joining Gluster, Backlund was senior vice president of worldwide sales at Baynote, a provider of personalization and digital marketing optimization solutions. During his time at Baynote, Backlund also held the position of interim CEO.
Previously, Backlund was CEO at Quorum Labs. He also held executive sales positions at open source pioneer SpikeSource as well as Computer Associates.
As senior vice president of field operations at Interwoven, Backlund led the company from less than one million to over $200 million in annual revenue and a successful IPO.
Recently at the Citrix Synergy event, Citrix Systems announced Citrix GoToManage Monitoring for XenServer, a new integrated offering for IT professionals and SMBs who need to monitor and manage a range of devices in support of increasingly distributed, remote and mobile workforces.
GoToManage consists of a real-time remote support module and a monitoring module, which provides detailed real-time server monitoring, inventory and software discovery, and network tracking.
The addition of GoToManage Monitoring for XenServer offers a new single view to track the health and performance of all key physical and virtual IT infrastructure. The service is cloud-based, enabling SMBs to tackle the complexity of managing their servers without the added expense of deploying expensive hardware and software probes.
The XenServer functionality is included at no additional cost for all GoToManage Monitoring customers. Also, GoToManage Monitoring has a free version that allows anyone to monitor two servers and inventory and track up to 18 other devices (e.g. computers, switches, routers).