Sumo Logic, a startup focused on enterprise log management and analytics, has raised $15 million in Series B funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from previous investors Greylock Partners and angel investor Shlomo Kramer. The new funding brings the startup’s total venture capital backing to $20.5 million.

Today, Sumo Logic emerged from stealth to unveil its log management and analytics platform, aiming to help companies to uncover operational and security insights buried in enterprise log files. The startup was founded by ArcSight veterans Christian Beedgen and Kumar Saurabh in 2009, to provide a cloud based system for managing the massive amounts of enterprise log data.

similar to other cloud based data management offerings, Sumo Logic wants to eliminate the need for expensive on premise-based log management applications. Using algorithms, the service provides enterprises with operational and security insights from their log data in real time, at a massive scale. We’re told the service can analyze petabytes of log-data a day.

Sumo Logic’s architecture features an elastic petabyte scale platform that collects, manages and analyzes enterprise log data, reducing millions of log lines into valuable operational insights in real time. The cloud-based service is powered by Sumo Logic’s Elastic Log Processing, which is a scalable architecture that enables log analytics at a large scale; and LogReduce, which are a set of adaptive algorithms that reduce millions of logs into a small number of patterns.

The platform also features real-time interactive forensics and push analytics to provide proactive detection and notification of trends, changes and anomalies in data. Sumo Logic’s service also mines global trends and anomalies across customer organizations.

As Beedgen explains, there is a major opportunity behind providing a cloud-based alternative to log management because enterprises have real problems managing and analyzing log and machine data. He says existing products can suck in data but have poor analytics and data analyzation with too many false positives.

Sumo Logic has an innovative approach, he says, because it provides a scalable elastic architecture, applied machine learning for IT intelligence, and the horsepower to process massive amounts of IT data.

The new funding will be used towards expanding engineering and marketing. Sumo Logic faces competition from Splunk, which just filed for an IPO.

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Venture capital firm Battery Ventures this morning announced that it has made an investment in Continuuity, a stealth ‘big data’ startup founded by Battery entrepreneur-in-residence Todd Papaioannou (formerly VP and Chief Cloud Architect for Yahoo).

Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and a group of angel investors including Bob Pasker, Paul Ambrose, Matt Ocko and The Data Collective also participated in the round.

It’s unclear what Continuuity is building, and the press release makes us none the wiser:

Continuuity’s goal is to enable the development of the next wave of real-time Big Data applications.

Ok then. Here’s a recent video interview of Papaioannou talking about trends in big data:

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In 2011, Sony had several major security breaches: Sony Online Entertainment, Sony Pictures, and Playstation Network all were attacked and private data was successfully stolen. Their handling of the attacks, particularly the larger PSN one, was widely criticized.

Many users are either unaware or acutely aware of how many sites and services have financially or personally sensitive information on record. Events like the Sony hacks do not reassure them, and actions like Google’s yesterday (though arguably innocuous) may alarm them. Users want more control and more security.

And the EU is looking to give it to them. But with the threat of enormous fines, many companies will find that the most logical thing to do is move away from the entire business of storing and serving user identities.

It’s a simple fact that maintaining a database of a hundred thousand or a million (or far more) active users is a serious engineering problem in both software and hardware. Keeping things secure but still accessible, staying abreast of new regulations (like those proposed in the EU), providing localized support on billing and user data issues — it’s quite a task. Web enrollment in software and services is growing at a huge rate, and many products and “real” items such as cars and banks are increasingly reliant on online services as well. It’s been happening for a long time, sure. But the stresses are starting to get out of hand.

If you’re a car company, or a movie distribution service, or a game publisher, the process of keeping and tracking your users securely is becoming too great of a portion of your business. And with increased regulation and requirements like the EU’s (which some are calling “onerous” and a “tax” on businesses that keep electronic records, but are probably nevertheless inevitable), it’s not something on which they can get by with minimal effort.

So what will happen? The same thing that happens whenever a part of an industry begins to outgrow its role: new, dedicated companies sprout up and the world offloads the task onto them.

This already happens to some extent, of course. It’s not like every company in the world maintains an independent and proprietary database of its users. There are services and software for this purpose, and the user-management business is plenty real already.

But for the millions and millions of people and accounts still internally managed (numbers that are growing worldwide in any market you can think of as online services gain more traction), the situation no longer makes sense. Why should a company that runs a movie distribution service also be running a world-class user-management service? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like a restaurant making its own forks.

It was logical for a while that data related to Sony services should reside on Sony servers, administrated by Sony. But in a day where our logins transcend sites, and everything we do is personalized, that no longer really rings true — to Sony, that is. Regular humans want to go to a site, put in their user name and password, and have their data retrieved. They don’t really care if the data is served by Sony or a third-party site because it’s never said one way or the other.

But for Sony and companies like it, the increasingly expensive and complicated user-management part of their business is starting to look like an attractive target for spinning off to third-party services. And third-party services are going to start revving their engines to attract these user-weary multinationals. This doesn’t apply to services like Instagram and Spotify, naturally; they’re account-focused to begin with.

It will be much easier for a company built from the ground up for user databases to handle these requirements and adjust to local laws. They can do it faster, better, and cheaper than an internal team, and compete directly with each other. It’ll be good for the user data sector and good for the multinationals hoping to offload this burden. Not to mention good for the users: the EU regulations require fast turnaround on data, instant notification of security breaches, and impose heavy fines for abusive or neglectful companies. Sony wants to worry about the quality of its games and devices, not about whether each of its 20 internal user-tracking divisions is jumping through legal hoops.

Secure account management isn’t the most exciting business, but you better believe it’s going to show some serious growth over the next few years, and everyone will gain by it.

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Data storage solutions provider Nexenta this morning announced that it has secured $21 million in Series C funding in a round led by new investor Menlo Ventures and joined by Sierra Ventures and Razor’s Edge Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners and TransLink Capital.

Nexenta claims its open source storage software solutions help enterprises avoid vendor lock-in and enjoy unified storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.

Nexenta has operations around the world in the United States (Mountain View, California), Russia, and India. Its customers include the U.S. Army and Korea Telecom.

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Code 42 Software, a Minnesota-based online backup company for consumers, businesses and the enterprise, has raised $52.5 million in funding led by Accel Partners with participation from Split Rock Partners. This is the first major investment from Accel’s recently announced Big Data Fund, which is dedicated to funding infrastructure and application companies in “Big Data.” This is the first round of institutional investing for Code 42.

You may not have heard of Code 42, but the enterprise company should be on your radar. Founded by Brian Bispala, Mitch Coopet and Matthew Dornquast, Code 42 launched CrashPlan, a personal data protection and backup software, back in 2007. The intention of CrashPlan was to reinvent backup by developing an easy-to-use technology to protect data whenever and wherever it is created. After introducing CrashPlan to consumers, Code 42 decided to use this knowledge gained to develop and deliver a backup software that was enterprise-grade.

Just five years after launching CrashPlan, Code 42 now manages and protects over 100 petabytes of data globally. In addition to CrashPlan for consumers, Code 42’s product lineup includes online backup solutions for the SMB, CrashPlan PRO, and private and public cloud solutions for the enterprise, CrashPlan PROe. All of the company’s data storage and backup products are cross-platform, and provide continuous protection onsite, offsite and online.

The virtue of Code 42′s offering is that the software can be used for both public and private clouds. Dornquast explained to me in an interview that most large enterprises believe in a hybrid model, with four out of five of the company’s enterprise customers building their own private cloud as opposed to relying on an untrusted cloud.

Dornquast says that Code 42′s ‘secret sauce’ is the company has engineered its own storage technology, that allows businesses to build their own private clouds. As he explains, Code 42 is “part software company, part cloud storage company, and part managed appliance hardware company.”

Crashplan product has been deployed in over 4000 “big data” enterprise environments and customers include: Adobe, Google, Groupon, HP, Intuit, NASA, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, and Stanford University. For example, Dornquast said Google has been is using Crashplan for internal data storage. While revenue was not disclosed, the company has seen 500 percent growth over the last three years, and is profitable.

Accel partner Ping Li explains that managing data on multiple devices is a challenge for both consumers and the enterprise, and being able to move this data safely and securely is becoming more and more important. With this in mind, there needs to be real technology behind this issue, he says. Li (and Accel) believes that device and information data management in the cloud is an example of a big data application ripe for disruption.

Code 42 provides a scalable and seamless multi-device “big data information management platform” to continuously protect and manage this growing data in real-time across any device.

What struck Li has being particularly unique about Code 42 (besides the technology itself) is that although the startup provides major infrastructure and helps manage massive amounts of data, the UI is lightweight and resonates with the trend of the consumerization of IT.

As Dornquast tells me, this clean, consumer product-like experience is one of the key reasons the company has been able to pull in customers like Google. The company has been able to back-up over 250 million files per day across multiple data centers  globally; and service customers from soccer moms to Fortune 100 companies.

Code 42 faces competition from Carbonite, Box and others.

The new funding will be will be used to accelerate multi-platform product development and increase sales and marketing efforts internationally.

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Virtualization data management software maker Actifio has raised $33.5 million in a Series C financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with previous backers North Bridge Venture Partners, Greylock Partners and Advanced Technology Ventures participating.

Founded in 2010, the startup has secured a total of $57.5 million in venture capital funding to date.

Actifio bills itself as a ‘Protection and Availability Storage’ platform company, offering data management solutions to small to medium-sized businesses, large enterprises and managed service and cloud service providers.

This is what the formal pitch sounds like:

Actifio’s mission is to virtualize management of data and consumerize the operations to enable transformation of the data center into an SLA-driven services organization.

Beginning with addressing IT’s most frustrating challenges (backup, disaster recovery and business continuity), the Actifio PAS platform is expanding to address test and development, analytics, compliance, e-discovery and other business-critical requirements, creating a new category of storage that efficiently virtualizes and manages copies of production data.

Peter Levine, a veteran enterprise IT exec (Veritas, XenSource, Citrix) and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has joined Actifio’s board.

Actifio is led by CEO Ash Ashutosh (formerly VP & chief technologist of HP’s StorageWorks division), president Jim Sullivan (previously VP, Worldwide Sales at IBM System Storage) and David Chang (formerly founder and VP of Product Management at AppIQ – acquired by HP).

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Coraid, a developer of Ethernet SAN storage solutions, this morning announced that it has closed a sizable $50 million series C round led by Crosslink Capital. Coraid’s existing investors Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital, Azure Capital Partners and affiliates of Silver Lake all participated in the round, as well as new investors including Seagate Technology and Kinetic Ventures.

As Robin pointed out in coverage of the company’s series B investment, it’s interesting to see Menlo Ventures both lead series B and continue with follow-on, considering it was the largest investor in data storage company 3PAR, which was acquired by HP for $2.35 billion last year. It seems like Coraid is Menlo’s next big bet in enterprise storage, and with the startup now having raised $85 million in outside investment, it may well be a target for acquisition.

To that end, Coraid also announced today that it has surpassed 1,500 customers in 45 countries, making it one of the up-and-comers in the $30 billion enterprise data storage market. With its series C investment, Coraid plans to expand global operations and continue developing technology in storage and cloud orchestration.

Coraid’s value proposition lies in its so-called EtherDrive, which offers a considerable price and performance advantage over legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI solutions. In line with its mantra, Coraid recently acquired of cloud orchestration software vendor Yunteq to enable automation of storage, networks, and security for both public and private clouds.

John Jarve, GP at Menlo Ventures, said in the press release that Coraid has “pioneered a new category of storage” with Ethernet SAN, and that the company represents the next-generation of scale-out virtualized storage which helps companies with growing sets of data move past those aging storage technologies.

In other words, Coraid wants to help remove the roadblocks to virtualization and cloud computing, and the company thinks that leveraging improvements in flash storage can help do just that. Its new EtherFlash solution delivers 200,000 IPOS per shelf at $10 per GB.

For more, check ‘em out at home here.

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Oracle has acquired Endeca, a company that powers enterprise search for large companies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Endeca has raised a total of $65 million from Bessemer, Venrock, Intel, SAP, Ampersand Capital Partners, DN Capital and Lehman Brothers.

Endeca’s core technology enables companies to correlate and analyze unstructured data and provides enterprise search for large companies including Borders, Boeing, the Census Bureau, the EPA, Ford, Hallmark, IBM, and Toshiba. The company specializes in guided search, and auto-categorizing results based on the keywords someone enters. Endeca charges from $100,000 to more than $10 million per installation.

Endeca’s InFront offering allows businesses with tools for advanced merchandising and content targeting for e-commerce. And Endeca Latitude enables businesses to rapidly develop analytic applications that draw information and data from unstructured and structured sources together.

Oracle says that the combination of Oracle and Endeca is expected to more advanced enterprise data management platform. Companies will be able to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together. For example, Oracle says the combination of Oracle’s own commerce application, ATG Commerce and Endeca InFront is expected to enhance cross-channel commerce, merchandising, and online customer experiences. And Oracle’s Business Intelligence offering and Endeca Latitude will be combined as well to give businesses a more powerful analytics platform.

Endeca currently has over 600 customers.

Other recent Oracle acquisitions include Pillar Systems, and Fatwire Software.

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IT professionals surveyed reported that 65 percent of organizations
frequently experienced data loss from a virtual environment. This represents a
140 percent increase in virtual data loss when compared to a similar survey last
year.

alt="IT Infrastructure Strategy Charter ISO" vspace=3 align=right
src="http://www.it-toolkits.com/images/IT_Infrastructure_Strategy_Charter.gif"
width=91 height=117>Other key findings indicate that 53 percent of those
surveyed experienced five virtual data loss incidents in the past year and 12
percent of respondents experienced data loss more than five times in the past
twelve months.

Common causes of data loss from virtualized environments include file system
corruption, deleted virtual machines, internal virtual disk corruption, RAID and
other storage/server hardware failures and deleted or corrupt files contained
within virtualized storage systems.

A virtualization data loss can be catastrophic for an organization.
Determining the financial impact of a business disruption is difficult because
there are both tangible factors, including productivity loss, missed sales
opportunities and staff’s hourly time, but also less tangible factors such as
potential non-compliance penalties, damage to corporate image and weakened
customer confidence.

“Successful organizations realize that any disruption within the virtual
infrastructure, regardless of how small, will have an amplified impact on the
business as a whole,” said a manager of data recovery operations.
“Virtualization contracts often claim no liability for data corruption,
deletion, destruction or loss. As a result, it is critical for IT leaders and
business continuity planners to proactively include a data recovery service
provider in their contingency plans.”

In addition to implementing virtual data centers onsite, organizations are
increasingly turning to third-party cloud providers as a means of data storage.
When asked about their cloud provider’s ability to properly handle data loss
incidents, 55 percent revealed a lack of confidence. In fact, only 39 percent of
respondents said their cloud provider educated their organization on how they
would approach a data disaster/data recovery situation from the
cloud.

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