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Virsto Software Adds Another $5 Million To Series B Round

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Virsto Software, a provider of VM-centric storage-hypervisor software, has landed a follow-on investment to the tune of $5 million to its June 8 Series B round of $12 million, bringing the total investment in the round to $17 million.

Southern Cross Venture Partners and Correlation Ventures join as new investors – InterWest Partners, August Capital and Canaan Partners backed the company earlier. Southern Cross was an investor in EvoStor, an Australia-based developer of storage solutions for the VMware market, which Virsto acquired earlier this year.

The additional funding will be used to accelerate growth, broaden industry partnerships and expand hiring to support continued innovation in Virsto’s products that bring performance, functionality and cost back into line for storage in virtual environments.

The company also plans to use the proceeds to enter the VMware market this year.

Founded in 2007, Virsto has developed the first multi-platform VM-centric storage hypervisor. A partner of Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware, Virsto’s software lets organizations change the economics of storage in server and desktop virtualization, increasing performance and management flexibility while lowering storage costs.

Virsto Lands $12 Million To “Transform Virtual Machine Storage”, Buys EvoStor

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Virsto™ Software has raised $12 million in Series B venture capital funding to drive new growth, product development and expand industry partnerships. The funding was led by InterWest Partners, and previous investors August Capital and Canaan Partners also participated in the round.

Khaled Nasr, a partner at InterWest who focuses on enterprise IT and data center infrastructure, will join Virsto’s board of directors.

In addition, Virsto today announced its acquisition of EvoStor, a company specializing in storage virtualization technology for VMware environments, to further deliver on the vision of multi-hypervisor support for reliable, heterogeneous, high-performance and low-cost storage.

Founded in 2007, Virsto has developed a hypervisor-based storage solution built for virtual machines. A close partner of Citrix and Microsoft, the company has a track record of advancing storage virtualization in the enterprise.

Today’s news also includes the acquisition of intellectual property and key team members from EvoStor, deepening Virsto’s bench of talent and technology.

EvoStor was an early innovator in the VMware storage market, delivering easy-to-deploy, reliable, scalable and affordable solutions. The strong partnership between EvoStor and VMware will benefit Virsto as it readies its software solutions for additional hypervisor platforms.

The new Virsto R&D team in Melbourne, Australia is working on near-term products that will be launched in coming months, as well as next-generation technology to be released in 2012.

The $12 million in Series B financing follows a $7 million Series A round in June 2009, with more than $20 million raised to date.

Virsto Debuts Storage Virtualization Software for Virtual Desktop Deployments

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Virsto Software has introduced Virsto VDI, a hypervisor-based storage virtualization solution designed to significantly decrease the costs of virtual desktop deployments while improving end users’ desktop experience.

Initially supporting Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft VDI running on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, Virsto VDI is architected to be storage- and hypervisor-agnostic and enables users to provision and manage thousands of virtual desktops, maximize consolidation of server and storage hardware, and reduce overall storage costs for VDI deployments by more than 70 percent.

Virtual desktop environments differ in significant ways from virtual server environments that are often deployed to meet consolidation objectives and support private cloud initiatives.

Virsto VDI is now generally available. Pricing for Virsto VDI is $2,800 per host, with 1 TB of logical storage per license.

Virsto Software Names Two New Vice Presidents

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Virsto Software, provider of optimized storage virtualization software, today announced the appointment of Gregg Holzrichter as vice president of marketing and Eric Burgener as vice president of product management.

Holzrichter brings 20 years of marketing success with companies in server virtualization (VMware), CRM (Siebel Systems), ERP (PeopleSoft), customer experience management (Medallia), and consumer packaged goods (Robert Mondavi/Caliterra). At Siebel, Holzrichter helped build one of the most admired go-to-market organizations in the industry. He held a leadership role in product marketing at PeopleSoft, responsible for worldwide marketing for financials ERP.

Holzrichter led VMware’s global campaigns and operations, in addition to Americas marketing, scaling his organization from $100 million to over $1 billion in revenue in under four years. Most recently, Holzrichter was the vice president of marketing at Medallia.

With a broad range of experience working for storage software companies like Veritas, Topio, and Mendocino Software and systems companies like Tandem, Pyramid and Sun, Burgener brings expertise in marketing, business development, and delivering product strategy and roadmaps. Prior to joining Virsto, Burgener was the vice president of marketing at InMage. He also has been an Executive in Residence with Mayfield, and a storage industry analyst at Taneja Group.

Virsto Raises $7 Million For Virtual Storage Solutions

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Virsto Software, provider of storage solutions for virtual servers, announced today it has completed its Series A round of funding, raising $7 million. The round was led by August Capital and includes Canaan Partners.

Canaan Partners was also a seed investor in Virsto in 2008. Virsto will use the funds to launch its new storage solution for virtual servers. The company will also focus on building its customer base and engaging new partners. Maha Ibrahim, General Partner at Canaan, will remain on Virsto’s board of directors and Vivek Mehra, General Partner at August Capital, will join the board.

Virsto was founded in the fall of 2007 to address the growing need for cost-effective and efficient storage for virtualized data centers.

Virtualized data centers are transforming IT infrastructures by reducing costs, improving performance and increasing efficiency. Server virtualization platforms from VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat, and others are being rapidly adopted as the technology matures.

Most data storage systems in use today were designed before server virtualization came about. The older storage techniques and technologies used for physical servers are not optimal for virtual servers. While existing vendors have tweaked storage solutions to work better for virtual servers, the products are inadequate, expensive and complex. Later this year, Virsto will launch a new type of storage solution designed for the unique needs of virtual servers.