Tag: VMware

Midokura Raises $17.3M In Series A Funding For Network Virtualization For IaaS

Today, Midokura announced the finalization of $17.3 million in Series A funding in a round led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan with additional participation from NTT Group’s Venture Fund, DOCOMO Innovations Inc. and NEC Group’s Venture Fund, Innovative Ventures Fund Investment L.P. The funding is intended to expand Midokura’s product development teams and contribute to the refinement of its go-to-market strategy. Coincident with the news of Midokura’s Series A funding is the announcement that Dan Mihai Dumitriu, formerly CTO, replaces Tatsuya Kato as CEO. Co-founder Tatsuya Kato will assume the responsibility of Chairman of the Board. CEO Dan Mihai Dumitriu remarked on the significance of the capital raise and the company’s software defined networking technology as follows:

As enterprises and carriers embrace and build out IaaS clouds, an overlay-based network virtualization platform will soon be a must-have technology. The financial support of Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, and other key backers, validates our strategy as well as the work we’ve done over the past three years developing our industry leading product MidoNet. This funding will enable us to accelerate our product engineering, the establishment of partnerships, and the growth of our customer base. We look forward to delivering the most performant, scalable and fault tolerant network virtualization solution to the IaaS infrastructure market.

Here, Dumitriu neatly summarizes the concept behind Midokura’s Midonet platform, a distributed, software-defined virtual network solution targeted toward IaaS cloud-service providers as well as enterprises. Midokura plays in the space made famous by VMware acquisition Nicira, but is designed differently because of its decentralized, fully distributed architecture as elaborated by Brad Hedlund. The company is already a veteran contributor to the OpenStack community and is in the process of gearing up to announce further partnerships with other cloud platforms in the upcoming months according to Chief Strategy Officer Ben Cherian. Now that the company is flush with a significant infusion of cash, the industry should expect to hear more news about Midokura’s penetration into the U.S. market as its unique software defined networking platform increases its footprint in IaaS infrastructures and delivers simplified network infrastructures and protocols for data transmission in addition to high performance and high availability virtual networking solutions.

Dell announces plans to invest $1 billion in cloud computing

Dell announced it plans to spend $1 billion in cloud computing products and services over the next fiscal year in an attempt to gain market share in an environment currently dominated by Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Rackspace and HP. Over the next two years, the company plans to build 10 data centers devoted to deployment of cloud computing technology in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Moreover, the company plans to open a total of 22 Global Solutions Centers that enable customers to obtain consultative services about the cloud computing strategy that constitutes the best fit for their organization. In support of its plans to invest in cloud computing infrastructure, Dell announced the availability of vStart, a product that integrates server, storage, networking and management ability to provide customers with out of the box, racked and cabled virtualization hardware and software. Designed to instantly enable the virtualization of 100-200 machines in its initial configuration, vStart comes pre-loaded with VMware’s ESXi hypervisor virtualization technology but expects to accommodate a broader range of virtualization technology as the product matures. vStart 100’s technical specifications include a PowerEdge 610 server for managing the VMWare technology, 3 PowerEdge R710 servers, Dell EqualLogic™ PS6000XV iSCSI storage, Dell PowerConnect™ 6248 switches and Dell management tools.

Dell’s decision to invest heavily in cloud computing marks the most explicit recognition from the Texas based IT corporation that the market for PCs and data center servers is insufficient to sustain its growth in an enterprise environment that increasingly seeks IT standardization and efficiency, and a consumer environment that demands access to information in real-time, 24-7. Dell has yet to announce what cloud computing software will power its IaaS and PaaS offerings in the data centers it intends to build. One possibility is that the IaaS platform will feature the OpenStack platform while the PaaS leverages Microsoft Azure. In an April 6 press conference in San Francisco, Steve Schuckenbrock, Dell’s president of Dell Services, noted that Dell’s forthcoming cloud computing data centers will house “public and private cloud capabilities.”