Cloud computing software and service provider Joyent has secured an $85 million round of new funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by European group Weather Investment II. It also included Telefónica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom giant Telefónica, which participated as a strategic investor.

Weather II is a strategic shareholder in telecommunications companies. Most notably, it holds a 20% stake in Vimpelcom, the world’s sixth largest mobile telecommunications group by subscribers. Joyent states that Weather II was advised in the round by investment and management group Accelero Capital. Both Weather II and Accelero focus on telecommunication and related media and technology companies in telecom and enterprise markets.

“We are delighted to make this strategic investment in a company that is providing solutions to some of the toughest problems in cloud computing, such as cloud performance, resiliency and security,” said Khaled Bichara, co-CEO of Accelero Capital.

Meanwhile, Matthew Key, Chairman & CEO of Telefónica Digital praised how Joyent’s technology would fit perfectly with technologies it has developed in-house and its own cloud services model.

Joyent’s cloud software suite SmartDataCenter is used by developers and enterprises worldwide. With JoyentCloud.com, the company provides public cloud services to a number of well-known companies, including LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe, Dell and Kabam. It’s also the steward of the open source server-side JavaScript project Node.js, a runtime for developing data-intensive, real-time apps, and a contributor to Joyent SmartOS, an open source project which powers the commercial software SmartDataCenter.

According to David Young, CEO and founder of Joyent, the new funding will enable Joyent to “build out a global compute offering to assist customers in expanding consistent software, support and services to their clients.”

Throughout 2012, Joyent plans to roll out a collection of “seamlessly connected high performance clouds” serving global corporations on every continent, the company says.

The San Francisco-based company had previously raised $5 million in September, which brought it close to $30 million total. The company’s existing investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital, and Liberty Global.

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Cloud computing is very different from traditional networks and applications.
In general, a service or offering is considered cloud computing if it has at
least four of these seven traits: alt="Cloud computing" vspace=3 align=right
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longDesc="Client Server Management">

• Internet (or intranet) accessible


• A massively scalable, user-configurable pool of elastic computing
  resources (such as network
  bandwidth, compute power, memory, etc.)


• Multitenancy (one large software instance shared by many customer
  accounts)


• A broad authentication scheme


• Subscription or usage-based payment


• Self-service


• Location indepedent

All of these traits offer new challenges to the computer security
professional, but accessibility, multitenancy, broad authentication, and lack of
location specificity are the four items responsible for the biggest technology
shift and demand for new security solutions.

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Gartner predicts that by 2012, 20% of all companies will no longer own their own IT assets; further indicating that by 2015, information-smart businesses will increase IT spending per head by 60%, with tools and automation eliminating 25% of IT-related expenses. Many experts predict that 2011 will be the year when cloud computing will begin to see widespread adoption across the mainstream business landscape. Jones Lang LaSalle’s recent Data Centre Barometer survey among European stakeholders found an increase in outsourced solutions from 50% 18 months ago to 75% this year.

The biggest driver for companies to outsource their data is the fact that they can make considerable savings and ease cash flow by replacing six-figure CAPEX investment costs – which they would otherwise have to pay if they bought their own servers – with OPEX payments for rented equipment. This allows them to conserve cash and create more efficiency without having to worry about spiralling maintenance costs and rapidly changing technology requirements which companies do not want to be saddled with.

Intelligent practise

Node4 is becoming a dominant force in Britain’s data centre market. With plans already underway to build its fifth data centre, the business is transforming the way that companies manage data across all sectors. Andrew Gilbert, Managing Director of Node4, believes that interests of companies are best served through access to a number of regional data centres, as the average customer will choose a data centre within a 30 kilometre radius of their base. The execution of Andrew’s strategy as the UK’s largest ‘data centres on the door step’ supplier, has secured him the crown of Britain’s largest independent provider of data centres. His strategic selection of sites situated close to the UK’s large conurbations such as Northampton, Derby and Wakefield has enabled Node4 to become a powerful draw for businesses wanting proximity to be a key priority as they look to outsource their data.

“Customers still want to touch and see their data centres, it provides them with a greater level of assurance, when their primary and often mission critical assets are in an environment they understand and control, as opposed to being far away, perhaps in a different legal jurisdiction and even time zone,” said Andrew.

Despite concerns about the safety and security of cloud computing highlighted by the recent IT challenges of megabrands Amazon and Sony, experts still predict its adoption will continue to grow. According to Forrester, the global cloud computing market will grow from £24.98 billion in 2011 to more than £147.95 billion in 2020, while the market for virtual private cloud solutions will grow almost eightfold to £40.76 billion in 2020. Private Cloud is a form of cloud computing where service access is limited or where customers are granted the ability to execute some control or ownership of the service implementation.

Andrew’s decision to invest in multiple sites across the UK is contrary to that of many of Node4’s competitors which have tended to invest in fewer, larger sites. It stems from his mission to build a robust infrastructure across geographies in order to minimize the risks associated with outages as he believes that part of countering the problems associated with outages is to outsource multiple cloud providers, by which means companies may be able to switch suppliers or spread the risk.

Andrew is one of the UK’s strongest advocates of the Private Cloud. Complementing Forrester’s prediction that the market for private cloud solutions will grow from £4.79 billion in 2011 to £9.76 billion in 2020, Andrew said, “The private cloud has addressed many of the concerns over security associated with cloud in the past. This has caused many enterprises to reconsider their choice not to convert from costly, on premise IT infrastructures. As a result of developments in the cloud we expect there to be a positive impact on the data centre industry.”

Node4 is a specialist in data centre and communications solutions. Launched in 2004, the company has grown rapidly in the past six years through its comprehensive service offering and the growth in demand for hosted IT from businesses all over the UK. Its competencies include colocation, managed hosting through dedicated servers and virtualised environments, connectivity, SIP trunking and hosted telephony.  It has four state-of-the-art data centre facilities, two located in Derby and one in Wakefield and one in Northampton, which offer the latest in security technology, ensuring that even the most mission-critical applications are hosted securely and protected. The company aims to be one of the UK’s major forces for colocation services in the UK and to this end, provides the highest levels of performance and system availability to its customers throughout the UK. Node4 ranked 45th position in The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 and won 1st place for fastest growing Midlands Technology Company in the Deloitte Fast50 and 22nd in the UK. The company also featured highly in 139th position of the Deloitte Fast 500 recognising fastest-growing technology companies across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Node4 is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, a Cisco Premier Certified Partner and also won the prestigious Cisco Innovation Award of the Year for the UK and Ireland.

For more information, please visit www.Node4.co.uk.

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San Francisco-based SQLstream, which provides a standards-based stream computing platform that enables its clients to harness and monetize their real-time service and sensor data, has raised $6 million from Fontinalis Partners.

The investment was announced earlier this week, but the financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed – a recent SEC filing reveals the size of the funding round though.

SQLstream enables businesses to exploit their real-time service and sensor data, and to analyze and respond to streaming data on the fly without first storing. This eliminates any delay from when the data arrive to when new answers stream out.

Using the SQL language, SQLstream executes queries on the wire, before data reaches the warehouse, enabling businesses to make smarter decisions sooner.

Fontinalis Partners is an investment firm co-founded by William Clay “Bill” Ford Jr., the great-grandson of Henry Ford, who serves as the Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ford Motor Company. The VC firm is, however, not affiliated with Ford in any way.

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Tuned, pretested DR support capabilities and services are now helping midsize
company managers reduce the risks of an extended business outage due to
disaster, and at more reasonable costs than ever before. Today, it is possible
to put in place disaster recovery technology and practices that may cost less
per user supported than older technology that did not support DR.

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Cloud computing is one possible answer to the need for such
flexibility,providinga highly automated,dynamic alternative for the acquisition
and delivery of IT services.Today users are tapping into public and private
clouds for computingresources and services without having to address the
underlying technology.Companies are leveraging the massive scalability and
collaboration capabilities ofcloud computing to solve problems in ways that just
weren’t possible before.Theyare deploying new services with greater speed and
without additional capitalinvestment.As IT budgets continue to be
stretched,cloud computing is enablingCIOs to do more with
less.Virtualization,standardization and other fundamentalfeatures of cloud are
lowering the cost of IT,simplifying IT service managementand accelerating
service delivery.

Such operational efficiency is helping companies capitalize on the globally
net-worked world.It is enabling CIOs to leverage the infrastructure more
effectively tosupport the business goals of their company.By lessening the drag
on data centerresources,cloud computing is enabling IT to hone in on real value
creation,namely innovation.Rapid,technology-enabled innovation is vital to
staying afloatin a highly volatile and uncertain economy.Cloud computing
provides the platformfor optimizing operations while creating and delivering the
kind of innovative serv-ices that differentiate and propel the business
forward.

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height=229>

These new DR implementations have provided some midsize companies with the
means to avoid shutdowns when and if their IT centers go offline – reducing
expected disaster-induced outage hours (downtime) per year. Importantly,
research shows these implementations can reduce costs by more than 35% compared
with unprepared centers using older technology.

Advanced processes and technologies can ease the backup process, introduce
more automation into the data replication process, and enable IT staff to
protect more applications with restart and recovery capabilities.Executives of
midsize businesses may wonder how to prepare for the possibility that a calamity
could wipe out their IT operations. The words “disaster recovery” (DR) evoke
images of the earthquake in Japan, or flooding in Chicago and Japan -
events that took businesses of all sizes offline.

However, it’s important to know that many business-disrupting outages result
from causes far less dramatic than natural disasters. Everyday events -
such as construction crews cutting through a power line, an air conditioning
failure, a network provider interruption, or a security issue - can take
systems offline. These interruptions happen more than most midsize business
managers expect and with increasingly critical impact, as customers become more
accustomed to accessing online information and placing orders online.

Ensuring business resilience requires IT managers to understand, budget
andplan for the critical differences in DR approaches called for in
virtualizedenvironments.

Cloud computing is one possible answer to the need for such
flexibility,providinga highly automated,dynamic alternative for the acquisition
and delivery of IT services.Today users are tapping into public and private
clouds for computingresources and services without having to address the
underlying technology.Companies are leveraging the massive scalability and
collaboration capabilities ofcloud computing to solve problems in ways that just
weren’t possible before.Theyare deploying new services with greater speed and
without additional capitalinvestment.As IT budgets continue to be
stretched,cloud computing is enablingCIOs to do more with
less.Virtualization,standardization and other fundamentalfeatures of cloud are
lowering the cost of IT,simplifying IT service managementand accelerating
service delivery.

Such operational efficiency is helping companies capitalize on the globally
net-worked world.It is enabling CIOs to leverage the infrastructure more
effectively tosupport the business goals of their company.By lessening the drag
on data centerresources,cloud computing is enabling IT to hone in on real value
creation,namely innovation.Rapid,technology-enabled innovation is vital to
staying afloatin a highly volatile and uncertain economy.Cloud computing
provides the platformfor optimizing operations while creating and delivering the
kind of innovative serv-ices that differentiate and propel the business
forward.

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While the cost of advanced storage solutions continues to decline, costs like
power and cooling, to say nothing about management complexity, can make life
more difficult and expensive for IT operations. The growing number of
sophisticated workloads can make it tempting to “throw more iron at the
problem,” but IT professionals are increasingly adopting the following
alternative approaches:

Server virtualization, which keeps physical server counts at manageable
levels even as the need for workload-specific servers is addressed

alt="Cloud Management" vspace=3 align=right
src="http://it-toolkits.com/images/CloudOutsourcingGuide.jpg"
longDesc="Security Manual Template - Sarbanes-Oxley">Cloud computing and
software as a service (SaaS), which provide access to advanced capabilities
delivered online rather than resident onsite

Server proliferation has not been a problem for small businesses, where the
average number of servers continues to be fewer than five. For midsize firms,
though, server counts move into the teens and beyond as firms grow. Unlike small
businesses, which have continued to add more servers over the past three years,
midsize firms have actually had a slight decrease in the average number of
servers they use. Virtualization is the answer, of course, with more
than
half of the midsize firms surveyed indicating that at least one of their
physical servers is virtualized. Server virtualization helps with power and
cooling costs, of course, but also facilitates effective management as well as
the opportunity to expand server resources without new hardware.

Cloud computing is also being deployed with increasing enthusiasm by midsize
firms, with roughly 18% of firms having some cloud resources in place and
another 18% planning to add cloud capabilities in the next 12 months. In theory,
this means that one-third of medium-sized businesses could be relying on cloud
computing in the next 12 months.

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Miszewski was formerly the general manager of Worldwide Government for Microsoft, where he advised national, regional and local government leaders on technology that supports their individual policy agendas and their citizens.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Miszewski was CIO for the state of Wisconsin where he oversaw the state’s approximately $400 million annual investment in information technology and was a strategic advisor in the governor’s cabinet.

For Salesforce, this represents a big push in expanding its client base into the public sector. The company also recently brought on enterprise tech visionary JP Rangaswami as Chief Scientist.

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CloudBees, a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, has raised $4 million in Series A financing led by Matrix Partners with participation from individual investors, including JBoss founder Marc Fleury and JBoss/HP/Bluestone vet Bob Bickel.

The round is said to be only the first in a multi-stage investment to provide CloudBees with the resources to build out a cloud-agnostic, cloud-native Java PaaS that covers both development services and a production runtime for Java.

The funding will be used to accelerate development and delivery of CloudBees’ RUN@cloud, a production runtime designed to complement DEV@cloud to create the most comprehensive Java PaaS covering the entire application management lifecycle, from development, through continuous integration and staging, to production and maintenance.

The company, which has just emerged from stealth in August 2010 with DEV@cloud, recently acquired InfraDNA (and its founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi, creator of the Hudson continuous integration server). CloudBees was founded by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey.

Matrix Partners’ General Partner David Skok and Bob Bickel will join the CloudBees Board of Directors. Skok was the original lead investor in JBoss, which was acquired by Red Hat for $350 million back in 2006.

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Scale Computing, a provider of midmarket clustered storage solutions, this morning announced it has secured $17 million in Series C funding in a round led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Northgate Capital and existing investors (including Benchmark Capital). This latest round of funding brings the total raised for the company to $31 million.

Rob Theis, managing director of Scale Venture Partners, will join Scale Computing’s board of directors.

The company says the funding will be used to increase its market share within the SME space, drive international expansion and product development, and fund job growth as the company expects to triple the number of staff in its Indianapolis headquarters over the next 36 months.

Scale Computing’s storage portfolio is based on the company’s so-called Intelligent Clustered Storage (ICS) technology:

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Dell has just announced it has agreed to acquire Software-as-a-Service integration company Boomi. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and, as usual, the purchase is subject to customary closing conditions. Dell did not say when it expects to complete the purchase.

Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell had yesterday teased the press about an impending acquisition in the cloud computing space (see Reuters).

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