Last week a very interesting stealth startup just entered the virtualization market and is preparing to launch a capacity management solution: VMTurbo.
VMTurbo is a very small (11 employees) US startup founded in 2008 by four people: Shmuel Kliger, Yuri Rabover, Shai Benjamin and Yechiam Yemini.
The first three have in common the same root as they all come SMARTS, the company acquired by EMC in early 2005: Kliger (President and CEO) was the co-founder and CTO, Rabover (Director of Product Strategy) was the Director of Technology Partners, and Benjamin was a Senior Staff Engineers.
Yemini (Chief Scientific Advisor) is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University since 30 years. He’s connected to Shaula Alexander Yemini, the other co-founder of SMARTS.
For some reasons only Kliger and Yemini appear and are listed as founders in the company’s website.
Quite interestingly, the advisory board includes Peter Levine, former CEO of XenSource (acquired by Citrix in August 2007 for $500M) and now Senior Vice President and General Manager, Datacenter and Cloud Division at Citrix.
The company is funded by Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners for an undisclosed sum.
While appearing at VMworld 2009, the company stayed under the radar until last week when it announced the opening of its early access program.
In April 2009 Rabover gave a lecture at Stanford titled Integrated Diagnostics of Root Cause Faults in Complex Network and IT Systems which explains very well the technology approach and vision behind the upcoming product.
Basically VMTurbo is applying the SMARTS approach to root cause analysis (RCA) to understand what are the best operations to perform inside a virtual infrastructure to guarantee maximum efficiency (or to correct existing inefficiencies). Two of the four founders of VMTurbo are in fact the inventors of the technology titled Apparatus and method for event correlation and problem reporting, filed in 2006 and assigned to EMC in 2006.
The upcoming VMTurbo virtual appliance will analyze the virtual data center, advice what to do next and automate the approved tasks.
This means that we are not talking about pre-implementation capacity planning, but rather of on-going, automated capacity planning, entering in competition with companies like CiRBA, VKernel and Lanamark.
Under the slogan of virtual infrastructure health is a mystery, the company promises up to 50% increase in utilization of physical compute resources and guarantees the capability to prevent performance problems in real time.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.