Thursday, February 07, 2008

VKernel and Hummer Winblad Join forces on Virtualization Infrastructure

Guest post by Lars Leckie.

Hummer Winblad is pleased to welcome Alex Bakman and his VKernel team to the Hummer Winblad family. We are very excited for the opportunities ahead and look forward to working together. The recent press release and further details can be found here.

Enterprise IT environments are undergoing one of the biggest shifts in 25 years – shifts that have not been seen since the move from mainframes to client-server. Big shifts in infrastructure open up large gaps in the current management solutions. Virtualized environments provide many benefits to the enterprise from flexibility to lower TCO but along with that have introduced a few headaches too…

- “vmotion” – servers growing legs and dynamically moving
- “vm sprawl” – servers multiplying at unmanageable rates
- Shared resources – performance, monitoring, resource accounting, etc
- Cost visibility – no longer tied to physical resources

vKernel is a new platform for system management in enterprises that are embracing virtual infrastructure to power their businesses. Enterprises IT managers face increasing challenges as virtualization spreads within the datacenter. vKernel provides an essential suite of virtual appliances tailored to meet the virtualized datacenter including chargeback and capacity planning management. These appliances require zero installation, are quick to deploy and provide insights within minutes.

More information can be found on vKernel’s website and webinars – or download the latest virtual appliance to try it out today.

Hummer Winblad’s enthusiasm in virtualization is captured by our investment in vKernel as well as several other companies including Scalent and Akimbi (acquired by VMWare).

2 comments:

  1. What do you see the future for third-party VM tools? Is there going to be a solution provider or will EMC/VMWare just acquire the good ones and/or add the features of some of the third party provides?

    Where do you see folks like VKernel, Scalent, Vizioncore in 3 years? Is it a viable industry to make third-party tools for VMWare?

    I don't see alot of third-party tools for EMC - usually its EMC-branded tools - the old IBM model, private, monolithic API - big blue or go home and I am interested in if you see VMWare following in EMC (and IBMs) footprints or more like a Microsoft which has a ton of partners - a shared developer API.

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  2. Lars Leckie - History has shown us that with each new reset of the datacenter infrastructure there will be a new stand-alone group of systems management companies. The component providers typically provide the core assets but do not do a good job of delivering cross platform systems management capabilities...VMWare has a good start on this market but I expect we will be seeing lots of cross platform pressure from Microsoft, ZenSource and others. Our discussions with large company CIO's give us confidence that there will be more than one component supplier for virtualization within the enterprise in the coming years. We certainly see a bright future for vKernel and Scalent...check out the latest vKernel/VMWare press release here. Thanks for your comments!

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