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3Leaf Systems Scores $35 Million in Series C Funding

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3Leaf Systems (previous coverage), a provider of virtualization solutions for enterprise data centers, today announced that it has secured new financing from a suite of blue-chip investors led by LSI Corporation with follow on investments by Alloy Ventures, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Intel Capital, and Storm Ventures.

3Leaf Systems says it will use the new capital to accelerate development of the company’s virtualization solutions and to expand sales and marketing activities.

Using 3Leaf’s products, enterprise data centers can dramatically increase their resource utilization and enhance their operational efficiency. The 3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server has been named a Best of VMworld award winner at VMworld 2007 for its innovation, value, performance, reliability and ease of use.

3Leaf Systems

[Source: Data Center Knowledge]

Elastra Raises $12 Million from Amazon for Cloud Management

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Elastra, a startup focused on providing solutions for internet cloud configuration and management, secured $12 million in Series B financing in its second venture round, which was was led by Bay Partners, with Amazon.com and existing investor Hummer Winblad also participating. Elastra had previously raised $2.6 million. If the investment by Amazon makes you raise your eyebrows too, go read the excellent analysis on GigaOM.

Check our previous coverage of the company here.

CEO Kiril Sheynkman says Elastra’s offering is unique because it can manage individual applications, rather than virtual appliances, and because it manages applications across private and public Internet clouds.

Elastra now has more than 40 paying customers running databases on Amazon’s cloud using its technology, and plans to announce support for VMware and additional components such as application and web servers. It’s also planning to support clouds other than Amazon.

Elastra

[Source: VentureBeat]

InstallFree Secures $8.5 Million in VC Funding

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InstallFree, a provider of Dynamic Desktop Computing, today announced (PDF) it has received $8.5 Million in financing to drive the expansion of its product development and go-to-market teams. This round of financing was led by venture capital firms Ignition Partners and Trilogy Equity Partners. Richard Fade and John Connors of Ignition Partners and Peter van Oppen and Chuck Stonecipher of Trilogy Equity Partners will join InstallFree’s Board of Directors. The round follows a first round of financing of $1.7 Million secured in November 2007.

InstallFree launched its first product in April 2008. The company’s solutions improve IT operational efficiency and increase end-user productivity by eliminating the need to install software applications thus overcoming application conflicts and enabling the delivery of incremental changes on-the-fly and on-demand. All of this occurs without changing the organization’s existing infrastructure. With InstallFree, end-users can access their complete set of personal applications from any computer and work anywhere without limitations, while enjoying local application processing and offline availability—without undermining the IT department’s centralized management capabilities.

Dynamic Desktop Computing is a platform that enables organizations to centrally deploy and manage Windows client applications to end-users in a stateless, flexible and cost-efficient manner across a variety of end-user scenarios such as the office, home or on the road. InstallFree presents an elegant solution, changing application and desktop virtualization from a one-off solution to a standard method of deploying and managing software applications throughout a company’s entire corporate infrastructure.

InstallFree

rPath Raises $10 Million More

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rPath, which got on our radar thanks to some high-profile customers, today announced that the company has closed a $10M round of venture financing. The Series C round was led by rPath’s existing backers, General Catalyst, North Bridge Venture Partners and Wakefield Group. The company says it plans to use this new capital to increase its leadership in enabling cloud computing.

rPath

“As the demand for cloud computing continues to explode, rPath is in a unique position to drive adoption as the fastest and most scalable approach for delivering applications to cloud computing environments such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Citrix’s XenServer, and VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure,” said Billy Marshall, rPath founder and CEO.

Since the beginning of 2008, rPath has seen a surge of interest in its technology resulting in an increase of over 100% in new customers, including 3SP, Avinity Systems, CERN, Cynapse, Department of Energy, DigitalStakeout, Firescope, VIP Tone and Webalo.

[Source: Private Equity HUB]

Parascale Raises $11+ Million In Series A Funding For Linux Cloud Storage

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Parascale, a provider of cloud storage solutions for rich media content in traffic-intensive applications, today announced that it has closed an $11.37 million Series A financing round led by venture capital firms Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

Parascale

Parascale plans to use the funding for product development and marketing initiatives in preparation for the launch of Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS), an application that aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud, accessible via standard file access protocols.

According to the news release, Parascale has developed a new class of storage solutions designed to support the wave of content-intensive applications, including video-on-demand, digital document archiving, scientific data analysis, video surveillance and medical image remote diagnosis among others. The company’s PCS software is patented technology which automatically and transparently migrates and replicates files among storage nodes to balance and optimize performance – without interruption in client access.

Parascale PCS

“With Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures, we have the two premier investors in the storage space supporting our company,” said Sajai Krishnan, Parascale CEO. “In the very specific technology domain where Parascale operates , clustered storage, Charles River’s success with EqualLogic has been the best clustered SAN-storage exit. Menlo’s investment in Spinnaker Networks has been arguably the best clustered NAS-storage exit. It is an honor to have Bruce Sachs of Charles River and John Jarve of Menlo on our board. Their voting with their wallets in leading the Series A round, is an affirmation of Parascale’s team, business model and opportunity.”

[Source: ByteandSwitch]

Neocleus Raises $11,4 M in Series B Funding

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Neocleus, a startup yet to release a product who recently unveiled its ‘endpoint virtualization’ strategy, seems to have been convincing enough in validating its approach to investors. The company has raised $11.4M in Series B funding (PDF) in a round led by Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds, its original investors.

Neocleus applies virtualization to desktops and laptops delivering the flexibility, manageability and security needed to address different user scenarios within a dynamic, dispersed enterprise. The company’s solutions, which include a Xen-based open source Type 1 bare-metal hypervisor for endpoints, aim to enable critical IT tasks to operate in isolated, trusted virtual environments with complete access to the capabilities offered by the underlying endpoint hardware.

Neocleus was founded in 2006 by industry veterans Ariel Gorfung (CEO) and Etay Bogner (CTO) and launched last May with the announcement of the Desktop Hypervisor Framework, an endpoint hypervisor enhancement to the Xen server hypervisor that the company will be contributing to the open source community.

Most recently Neocleus announced Trusted Edge, the first in a suite of virtual software appliances that allows for secure access to corporate resources – for employees, customers and partners – regardless of the endpoint’s location or state of security.