Blue Lane VirtualShield 4.2

VMware went shopping and came back home with Cupertino-based Blue Lane Technologies. Despite the lack of press releases, this transaction was confirmed by Mary Ann Gallo, VMware’s head of Global Public Relations. Unfortunately she could not disclose the financial details.

Update: according to Brenon Daly from The 451 Group, the price was around $15 million, and Blue Lane was in search for a buyer since last Summer because of lack of sufficient capital. He also mentions Blue Lane raised “some $18.4m in two rounds of funding”, but our information keeps it at $13.4m.

The acquired company provides solutions that secure virtual and physical data centers. Its solution secures servers and VMs by controlled code execution in the network and taking appropriate countermeasures against traffic aimed at known software vulnerabilities (without signatures).

Blue Lane was quite silent after releasing VirtualShield 4.2 last April. We interviewed Greg Ness, former VP of Marketing with Blue Lane (and avid blogger) and Thierry Evangelista, Technical Director Europe for the company at VMworld Europe earlier this year.

This acquisition confirms VMware’s commitment to virtualization security or VirtSec in short.

Blue Lane was founded in 2002 and has raised $13.4 million to date in two financing rounds from Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Matrix Partners. According to Greg Ness, who left the company last July to join Infoblox, Blue Lane has around 40 employees.

Below, you can find 3 embedded videos encompassing a long interview we did with Ness last June when he was still with the company.

Interview BlueLane Greg Ness 1/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

Interview BlueLane Greg Ness part 2/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

Interview BlueLane Greg Ness 3/3 from Toon Vanagt on Vimeo.

Thanks to Virtualization.info for the news.

Blue Lane Technologies

Blue Lane Technologies today announced the general availability of VirtualShield 4.2, which it claims to be the first virtualization security solution to include inter-VM flow analytics and enforcement, application-aware partitioning (VMwall), and a robust set of application, protocol and vulnerability security policy controls.

These capabilities in the latest release of VirtualShield, enhanced by VMware VirtualCenter integration, allow Blue Lane’s layer 7 architecture to apply granular application/protocol/port-based policy enforcement on the flows between VMs. According to the press release, VirtualShield’s accuracy, comprehensive protection and minimal processing requirements make it the first IPS capable of protecting virtualized production data centers from network-based attacks.

VirtualShield 4.2 includes:

Advanced flow analytics and policy enforcement by cluster, host, VM, data center, OS, application or protocol;
VMwall – Blue Lane’s Integrated application-aware firewall enforcement by cluster, host, VM, data center, OS, application or protocol;
A rich array of inbound/outbound application policy controls for intra-flow policy;
Protocol integrity check for aligning ports with appropriate protocols and services; and
A vulnerability policy framework to proactively protect VMs from attacks like SQL injections, cross-site scripting and http smuggling.

Blue Lane VirtualShield 4.2 will be available May 15. Current VirtualShield customers will receive the upgrade as part of their support plan.

VMware Buys Blue Lane (Updated)

Blue Lane Releases VirtualShield 4.2