Tag: Box

Kentik Emerges From Stealth With SaaS Network Analytics Solution And $12M In Series A Funding

Kentik emerged from stealth to reveal details of a cloud-based platform for network visibility that delivers an exceptional degree of visibility into network performance and operations in comparison to existing products. Formerly known as CloudHelix, the Kentik direct service aggregates network-related data from customers into a non-relational database and subsequently performs analytics to give customers real-time visibility into traffic within their network infrastructures. Kentik allows customers to upload data directly to its SaaS platform or to a virtual appliance that encrypts the data prior to its transmission. The solution has gained early traction with customers such as Box and Yelp in addition to large internet service providers. Sam Eaton, Director of Engineering Operations at Yelp, remarked on the innovation enabled by Kentik as follows:

Kentik has given us the insight and visibility that we have not been able to achieve through other network performance monitoring products or open source tools. With over 100 million average monthly unique visitors coming to Yelp, we see traffic reaching many gigabits per second, so it’s critical for us to be able to look deeply into all network traffic in real time and gain real insight. That’s where Kentik has helped. We can see things we simply couldn’t see before.

Here, Eaton remarks on Kentik’s ability to deliver real-time, granular insights into Yelp traffic that exceeds “gigabits per second.” Similarly, Box.com leverages Kentik to obtain geography-specific insights into network traffic that allow for timely and proactive remediation of network-related problems before they intensify. Today, Kentik also announces the finalization of $12M in Series A funding led by August Capital. The company’s Big Data platform for aggregating and analyzing network data aims to disrupt networking analytics by delivering an unparalleled degree of insight into network behavior in ways that support high availability, performance optimization and security-related use cases.

Advertisement

Red Hat Acquires Gluster for $136 Million In Cash

Red Hat, provider of open source enterprise software solutions, announced Tuesday that it had reached a deal to acquire the online storage company Gluster for $136 million. Gluster was founded in 2005 with the objective of objective of leveraging open source software and commodity hardware to provide enterprise customers with public and private cloud based storage solutions. Gluster FS constitutes the core of Gluster’s offering in the form of a distributed file system that can scale to thousands of client terminals and petabytes of storage. Gluster competes with Sun Microsystem’s open source Lustre file system and IBM’s General Parallel File System. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, the company currently has over 100 enterprise customers including Box.net, the personalized internet radio service Pandora and Deutsche Bank AG.

Red Hat’s acquisition of Gluster means that the commercial Linux distributor enters the $4 billion market for unstructured data storage. More importantly, the deal gives Red Hat the opportunity to define baseline standards for enterprise level management of unstructured data such as emails, log files and documents. Speaking of Red Hat’s motivations for the acquisition, Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens remarked:

The explosion of big data and the new paradigm of cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to re-think storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future. Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging between the two.

With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90’s paradigm of forcing everything into expensive, single-system DBMS residing on an internal corporate SAN has become unwieldy and impractical.

Stevens indicates how the proliferation of unstructured data at the enterprise level renders cloud based solutions increasingly attractive and viable. Whereas Red Hat excels with open source open source operating systems, virtualization and cloud computing platforms such as CloudForms and OpenShift, its acquisition of Gluster fills a critical infrastructure need involving the management of on premise data in the cloud.

Gluster founder and CTO Anand Babu Periasamy commented on the synergies of the acquisition by noting: “We believe this is a perfect combination of technologies, strategies and cultures and is a great development for our customers, employees, investors and community. Gluster started off with a goal to be the Red Hat of storage. Now, we are the storage of Red Hat.” Red Hat acquired Gluster for $136 million in cash. As part of the acquisition, Red Hat will assume ownership of unvested Gluster equity and offer equity retention incentives to Gluster’s employees.