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News and insights from the vibrant world of virtualization and cloud computing

Pogoplug Maker Cloud Engines Lands $15 Million In Funding

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Cloud Engines, the company behind personal cloud solution Pogoplug, today announced that it has raised $15 million in financing from new investors Softbank Capital and Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, and existing investor Foundry Group.

The company says the capital will be used to continue to expand the global distribution of the Pogoplug service and devices.

Said Ron Fisher, General Partner at Softbank Capital:

“Pogoplug is positioned to become the de facto way that consumers and businesses connect to their home and office storage. Pogoplug’s capabilities are perfectly suited for integration with offerings from Internet service providers as part of a monthly fee.”

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Rapid7 Expands Board With Industry Vet Christopher Young, Releases NeXpose 4.10

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Rapid7, provider of unified vulnerability management and penetration testing solutions, has appointed former RSA executive and VMware Vice President and General Manager Christopher Young to its board of directors.

Young previously served as senior vice president of RSA products, where during his six-year tenure he built RSA’s identity protection and verification business, led the company’s global engineering, product management and product marketing organizations, and was responsible for the strategy and delivery of RSA’s entire product portfolio.

Young joined VMware this past September to lead the company’s newly formed end-user computing business unit.

In related news, Rapid7 today announced NeXpose 4.10, the latest version of its vulnerability management solution.

NeXpose 4.10 provides operational efficiency and reporting with new features such as dynamic asset groups, advanced asset reporting filters, expansion of supported authentication methods and industry-leading detection with more than 61,000 vulnerability checks.

Rackspace Acquires Server Management Platform Startup Cloudkick

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Hosting company Rackspace is acquiring startup Cloudkick, which offers a server management system to businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cloudkick, based in San Francisco, boasts more than 1,500 customers and has more than 1 million servers pass through its tools.

In the coming months, Cloudkick’s offering will be integrated into the Rackspace family of products.

And for some good news:

To “kick” things off, starting today, all basic monitoring checks (HTTP, HTTPS, PING/ICMP, SSH, DNS, and TCP) are now 100% free on an unlimited number of servers for all our accounts — from the free forever developer account to our 1000 server plan.

For more information, check Cloudkick’s FAQ on the topic.

(Source: TechCrunch)

Cloud Storage Startup Nasuni Raises $15 Million In Series B Financing

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Nasuni this morning announced that it has closed $15 million in Series B funding led by Flybridge Capital Partners with participation from existing investors, North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners, who led the company’s Series A funding in March 2009. Investment in Nasuni now totals $23 million for the two rounds.

Chip Hazard, a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, has been named to the Nasuni Board of Directors. Jeffrey P. McCarthy, Partner at North Bridge, and Paul Flanagan, Managing Director with Sigma Partners, represent the current investors.

Nasuni develops the Nasuni Filer, a file server that leverages the cloud to change the way companies store their files. The Nasuni Filer runs as a virtual appliance and can be downloaded for free.

It delivers primary storage, indistinguishable from local storage, from an array of leading cloud storage providers. Now in its second generation, the Nasuni Filer eliminates lengthy file server migrations and the need for backups.

“We spent the last year building a loyal customer base and that proved invaluable during the fundraising,” said Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez. “We are now working with partners to leverage our sales capability. The time for utility storage has arrived and Nasuni is rushing to help companies make the transition. Chip Hazard is the kind of visionary investor who believed in that vision a decade ago. We want to delight customers by continuing to deliver a great service that radically simplifies file management.”

(Source: press release)

Dell To Buy Virtualized Storage Solutions Provider Compellent For $820 Million

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Dell has announced its intent to pick up Compellent, a provider of virtualized storage solutions with automated data management features, for $27.75 per share in cash for each share of Compellent (that’s a total equity value of approximately $960 million).

The aggregate purchase price is about $820 million, net of Compellent’s cash.

With the acquisition, Dell aims to broaden its portfolio of enterprise-class storage solutions:

The acquisition of Compellent will deliver on Dell’s commitment to provide its customers solutions that are open, capable and affordable. Dell delivers an open and integrated approach to data management that drives efficiency and dramatically reduces costs by streamlining operations.

The transaction, which has been approved by both companies’ boards but is still subject to approval by Compellent’s shareholders and customary closing conditions, is expected to close in early 2011.

Dell recently lost a bidding war for storage company 3PAR, against HP.

CommVault Releases Results Of End-User Virtualization Survey

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CommVault last week released the results of its Virtualization Survey, which polled Simpana software customers worldwide to determine the key factors driving adoption of server virtualization and the major challenges associated with managing these environments.

-A total of 479 respondents underscored the continued rise in server virtualization, with 46 percent of those polled citing that between 51- and 85-percent of their total servers were virtualized while 21 percent reported successful virtualization of all or nearly all servers. VMware was listed as the virtualization platform of choice by 83 percent of those polled.

The survey revealed that the top three factors driving server virtualization decisions among the respondents are: the need for improved business cost savings and efficiencies, customer responsiveness and improved service levels. The opportunity to leverage virtualization as an alternative disaster recovery strategy was also cited.

-The majority of CommVault customers polled for this survey are running mission-critical applications on VMs in their production environment. Some industry commentary has suggested that many organizations are reluctant to deploy vital applications on virtualized infrastructures because of data protection concerns. With Simpana software, CommVault continues to address these concerns, effectively alleviating data management difficulties in virtualized environments.

According to those polled, the top three challenges relative to managing virtualized server environments include the inability to backup all virtual machines (VMs) reliably and in a timely manner, additional resource costs and administrative time due to lack of data management automation and the increased demand for corporate-wide virtualization.