Year: 2010

Last week Pano Logic announced its third round funding, equal to $20M and led by Mayfield Fund.

As result, Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha will join the company’s Board of Directors.

With this investment, the startup raised more than $40M. The previous round, $18M, was led by Foundation Capital and Goldman Sachs.

Pano Logic revealed that its sales tripled in 2009 and while its revenue may just get better this year, the startup is seeing increasing pressure from bigger firms that embrace the idea of a zero client for thin computing and VDI environments.
Dell, for example, just announced its own zero client: the FX100.

Read more

Last week the virtualization security startup HyTrust announced its second round funding: $10.5M, led by Granite Ventures and Cisco.

The first round was equal to $5.5M, provided by Trident Capital and Epic Ventures.

Only Len Rand, Managing Director at Granite Ventures and former General Manager of Strategic Marketing and Global Alliances in Intel, will take a seat on the HyTrust Board of Director. Nobody from Cisco.

On top of this, HyTrust also announced that Jim Gannon, the former Director of Global Accounts at VMware, joined the company as its new Vice President of Sales.

The virtualization startup Reflex Systems may have changed its go-to-market strategy, focusing more on virtual infrastructure management than on security, but it didn’t forget its roots.

Exactly one year ago the company hired a former ISS executive, Preston Futrell, as new Vice President of Sales, in September 2009 launched a new version of its new flagship product that features a VMware VMsafe-certified policy compliance enforcement engine, and now it closes a deal with TippingPoint, a well-known player security market.

TippingPoint, a subsidiary of 3Com, which was recently acquired by HP, offers a popular line of intrusion prevention systems (IPS).
The partnership allows TippingPoint to include Reflex VMC in its Security Virtualization Framework, a bundle of products (Digital Vaccine Labs, vController, Security Management System and of course the IPS appliances) that enforces segmentation between virtual machines and supports separation of duties between the different teams that manage the virtual infrastructure.

At the end of January VMware released a couple of minor updates for its desktop virtualization platforms for Windows and Linux: Workstation and Player.
For some reasons we missed this product update, so we are reporting about it now.

The new build (227600) is primarily for bug fixing but it also introduces support for a number of guest and host operating systems:

Read more

After releasing Capacity Modeler to counter the new VMware CapacityIQ, last week VKernel released another free tool to keep the virtualization community engaged.

This one is called Capacity View. It is an extremely simple dashboard for Windows that summarizes the virtual infrastructure elements (data centers, clusters, hosts, virtual machines, resource pools, data stores), the resources allocation (both physical and virtual) and the amount of alerts that VMware vCenter is raising at any given moment.

The approach is quite brilliant: under each alert group (Performance Problems, Available Capacity and Over-allocated Resources) there’s a link to a relevant product that VKernel sells.
Many administrators may desire to monitor the virtual infrastructure with this single-window, essential console during the day, jumping on the fully-featured vCenter control panel only when it’s truly needed.
And while they may have no interest in the other VKernel products, there’s a daily reminder that those products exist under their nose. This is more than enough to develop a strong brand awareness and instill doubt that those products may be actually useful.

Read more

ConVirt (formerly XenMan) is an open source management console that supports multiple hypervisors, including Xen and KVM.
Originally started in 2006, the product was relaunched in March 2009, demonstrating a significant potential.

One year later, the company behind ConVirt, Convirture, releases version 2.0, which once again features notable capabilities:

• new architecture
  made of an AJAX web front-end which supports multiple administrators and a back-end data repository for the entire virtual infrastructure
• performance trends reporting
  capability to produce interactive charts about historical information in the data repository
• template compliance tracking
  capability to track how much a virtual machine changed from its original template and to flag discrepancies
• datacenter-wide monitoring
  both storage and network resources can be monitored from a single console rather than checking each host configuration

Read more

Last week VMware released a patch specifically for the version of Update Manager (VUM) that is included in vSphere 4.0 Update 1.

The new version (build 231675) is needed to fix a couple of bugs affecting capability to upgrade the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch and the time required to scan and patch hosts in a cluster.

Thanks to Yellow Bricks for the news.

Last week VMware updated its disaster recovery solution Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to version 4.0.1.1 (build 236215).

The new version is primarily for bug fixing and features enhancements. There are no new capabilities. Yellow Bricks published the complete list.

This version of SRM supports storage replication adapters from:

Read more

Trilead is a Swiss startup that entered the virtualization market in Q3 2008 with a backup solution for VMware virtual machines.

Its product, VM Explorer, reached version 1.5 in November 2008.  After long time, the company released version 2.0 last week.

This build introduces support for ESX 4.0 and for vCenter, which means that protected VMs are tracked even when they are moved on different hosts with vMotion or DRS.

Trustware is a US startup that entered the virtualization market in August 2006.
The company offers an application virtualization engine, BufferZone, that primarily targets consumer market.

The company released version 2.0 in January 2007 and version 3.0 in June 2008.
Now, after no less than one year and a half, Trustware launches version 3.30.

The new build is primarily for bug fixing but it also introduces support for Windows 7 (32bit only).

BufferZone key selling point is that it keeps your computer secure (more than an anti-virus) because of the isolation that application virtualization offers.
Maybe it’s true, but if Trustware can’t update its engine more frequently than once per year, it’s hard to believe that this product can defend itself against software exploits.