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

Funding

Pluribus Networks Raises $17.5 Million

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Pluribus Networks has raised $17.5 million in funding, an SEC filing reveals.

According to the company’s about page, its mission is to:

– Drive 3rd Wave of Virtualization into the Ethernet Hardware Market
– Deliver virtualized switches and distributed Netvisor operating system for true network virtualization with a fully programmable fabric
– Drive the commoditization of ethernet switch market

The company’s co-founders:

Robert Drost, Ph.D., CEO: former Senior Distinguished Engineer and Director of Advanced Hardware at Sun Microsystems

Sunay Tripathi (CTO): former Senior Distinguished Engineer for Sun Microsystems, and the Chief Architect for Kernel/Network Virtualization in Core Solaris OS.

C.K. Ken Yang, Ph.D., VP of Product Engineering: a Tenured Professor of EE at UCLA (on sabbatical)

Investors are Mohr Davidow Ventures and NEA.

(Via FormDs)

Cloud.com, a new Open Source Cloud management platform..

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With a domain like Cloud.com you are doomed to deliver something Virtualization related,

And today that plan became visible for the rest of the world, the company formerly known as VMOps , today emerges from stealth mode and announces that it will be rebranding to Cloud.com

We had a chat earlier this week with Peder Ulander who joined Cloud.com as chief marketing officer bringing more than 15 years of experience. Previously, Peter could be found at companies such as Sun Microsystems responsible for launching Java into the open source market by re-licensing, building a community and launching the open source Java platform. but also at other Open Source companies icluding MontaVista Software, the largest distributor of Linux for embedded devices, and Cobalt Networks, one of the early open source for networking companies, Cisco and Symantec.

Next to Peter the company also announced two other new additions to it’s management team

Kevin KLuge joins as vice president of engineering and previously served as vice president of engineering at Zimbra, an open source server software provider for email and collaboration, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007 and sold to VMware in 2009. Prior to Zimbra, Kluge was vice president of engineering at Corvigo, a leading anti-spam provider. Additionally, Kluge has held leadership positions at Openwave Systems, where he led engineering for multiple innovative products including instant messaging, voicemail and multi-media messaging services (MMS), Sun Microsystems and Portola Communications.

and Kyle MacDonald joins as chief evangelist having most recently served as vice president of corporate development and strategy for Hosting.com / Wachovia Capital Partners. Prior to this position, MacDonald held executive leadership positions at Sun Microsystems including leading the Web 2.0, Internet and next generation service providers sector at Sun Microsystems, acquired by Oracle in 2009. MacDonald also held the position of corporate technologist for software and strategic technology at AMD where he helped developed AMD’s software strategy and key strategic alliances with companies such as IBM, BEA, Adobe, EMC and Symantec.

The new team members join the team of CEO Sheng Liang, who founded the company in 2008. Liang has extensive experience in the technology industry and has served in a number of both technical and executive leadership roles. Prior to Cloud.com, Liang co-founded and served as CTO of Teros, which was acquired by Citrix in 2005. Sheng also was a member of the senior management teams at SEVEN Networks and Openwave Systems, and was the lead developer and key contributor to the success of the Java Virtual Machine at Sun.

Cloud.com also lets the Virtual world know that it closed a $11 million Series B round led by new investor Index Ventures. Current investors Redpoint Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $17.6 million

Apart from its new name, management and funding Cloud.com today also announced their product : CloudStack,
an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of private and public cloud services. They provide an integrated software solution for delivering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which comes in three distinct versions: CloudStack Enterprise Edition, CloudStack Service Provider Edition and CloudStack Community Edition.

CloudStack is the result of work started by VMops in 2008 and is already being used in productions by some key customers.

Next to the expected features such as definition, deployment and management of cloud devices, CloudStack also adds metering to the feature list, so billing can be done based on actual usage of the public , private or hybrid deployments.

About the Open Source release availabel on Cloud.com tells us :
The CloudStack Community Edition is distributed under the General Public License 3 (GPL3). The Community Edition offers a leading open source software stack integrated with the open source Xen and KVM hypervisors, and can be deployed with Ubuntu and Fedora distributions. With its simple to install software package, Cloud.com is a fully integrated binary that enables developers to quickly and easily build, manage and deploy IaaS clouds.

There is a lot of competition in the Open Source Cloud and Virtualization management area, Corporate OpenQRM just being relaunched by Matt Rechenburg, Eucalyptus these days being managed by Marten Mickos and Abiquo just having opened a new office in the US, … and this all seems just like the start

So I`m keen to follow this one … and I’ll be having a closer look at the Cloud.com platform in our lab soon.

Virtustream Raises $25 Million Equity Financing

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Virtustream a privately held infrastructure services firm, today announced the completion of new equity financing with total commitments of $25 million led by Virginia based Columbia Capital and Miami based Blue Lagoon Capital.

Virtustream is an infrastructure services firm committed to helping clients actualize the enterprise cloud by providing strategy, integration and managed services leveraging deep virtualization experience, and its own proprietary platform. The infusion of funding is part of Virtustream’s growth strategy and will be used to continue accelerating its platform development, build international presence and expand domain expertise.

Virtustream also recently completed the acquisition of VirtualizeIT, the premier European consultancy practice dedicated to the advancement and adoption of virtualization technologies, and Brigh Technologies (Brigh), the leading North American provider for the design and deployment of custom solutions in the virtualization space. The union brings together pioneers in enterprise computing including being one of the first VMware professional services partners in North America and the 2008 VMware EMEA Partner of the Year. The stockholders of both acquired companies will have an equity interest in Virtustream, and all employees will continue their employment with Virtustream.

Wanova Leaves Stealth Mode With $13 Million In Series A Funding

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Wanova has exited stealth mode and launched a “new era in desktop virtualization” with $13 million in A-round funding from Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures, and Opus Capital.

Founded by experienced entrepreneurs, the company has launched an architecture called Distributed Desktop Virtualization (DDV), which addresses the need for enterprises to improve the management, support and protection of distributed endpoints.

Wanova’s new architecture is designed specifically to address the endpoint management challenges presented by distributed remote and mobile workers. The Wanova DDV solution centralizes the entire desktop contents in the data center for management and protection purposes while distributing the execution of desktop workloads to the endpoints for superior user experience.

The founders of Wanova – Kessler and CTO, Dr. Issy Ben-Shaul – also co-founded Actona, which was acquired by Cisco and became the foundation for Cisco’s Application Delivery Business Unit. Prior to founding Actona, Kessler was vice president and general manager for Qualcomm Israel and a research staff member at IBM in New York.

Ben-Shaul was the CTO of the Application Delivery Business Unit at Cisco and led its technology and vision. Prior to Actona, he was a tenured faculty member at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, where he worked on wide area distributed systems.

Wanova is headquartered in San Jose, California with a development center in Netanya, Israel. The company’s solutions are currently in field testing with customers.

(via Venturebeat)

Citrix Leads $10 Million Investment In Vyatta

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Vyatta today announced it has completed its $10 million Series C round of financing led by Citrix Systems. The new funding round also includes existing investors, Comcast Interactive Capital, Panorama Capital, and ArrowPath Venture Partners. As part of the investment, Gordon Payne, senior vice president and general manager of the Delivery Systems Division at Citrix, has joined the Vyatta Board of Directors where he will assist the company in its next phase of development.

Today, Vyatta also announced that it has joined the Citrix Ready product verification program to create solutions for customers deploying cloud computing infrastructures.

Vyatta will use the funds for operating capital as the company scales its sales efforts and accelerates growth across multiple markets.

Vyatta runs on standard x86 hardware and can be virtualized with modern hypervisors, including the Citrix XenServer™ virtualization platform. Vyatta delivers a full set of networking features that allow customers to connect, protect, virtualize, and optimize their networks, improving performance, reducing costs, and increasing manageability and flexibility over proprietary networking solutions. Vyatta has been deployed by hundreds of customers world-wide in both virtual and non-virtual environments.

NextIO Raises $15 Million In Fourth Round Of Financing

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NextIO today announced that the company has received a $15 million round of Series D funding. NextIO is the industry leader in providing intelligent, rack-optimized I/O virtualization (IOV) solutions based on high-performance PCI Express (PCIe) switching technology.

NextIO received support not only from existing VCs and strategic investors, but participation from new strategic investment sources as well. The new funding will be used to expand NextIO’s sales, marketing and support and will allow the company to accelerate the delivery of its second-generation of Express Connect products.

Through I/O virtualization, NextIO products deliver an unprecedented combination of low cost, lower power consumption, greater ease of use, and greatly reduced maintenance requirements. For example, server rollouts that previously required days or weeks can be accomplished in less than 30 minutes, and routine server maintenance time is reduced from hours to minutes.

NextIO’s second-generation products build on the success of the company’s existing Express Connect products, which are at revenue and are currently being deployed in the U.S. and Europe. NextIO solutions are currently in use in a number of different markets for applications such as simulation, adding graphic processors to commodity computing environments, expanding I/O, speeding up existing I/O, and delivering new data center technologies.