Startup Ravello Launches Cloud Application Hypervisor
Rami Tamir and Benny Schnaider, who helped lead the development and distribution of the open source KVM hypervisor, on Tuesday launched what they hope will be an encore performance.
Their latest venture, Ravello Systems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company they formed in 2011, has come out of stealth mode. Ravello has developed what it's calling a "cloud application hypervisor." Coinciding with the company's launch, Ravello revealed it has raised a sizeable $26 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Ravello president and chairman Schnaider said in a statement that the company's Cloud Application Hypervisor "encapsulates multi-VM applications along with their entire environment including the VMs, networking, storage, etc. so that enterprises can run any application in any cloud without making any changes."
It's designed to make it easier for organizations to employ an approach to hybrid cloud computing known as "cloudbursting," where apps running in enterprise datacenters are subject to sudden demands for compute capacity resulting from unpredictable bursts in workload demands or transaction activity. Cloudbursting lets organizations obtain that compute from a public cloud provider.
Ravello's Cloud Application Hypervisor is designed to "normalize the application environment across private and public cloud," making it possible to run, taking into account the infrastructure discrepancies between the two, noted CEO Tamir.
Both Tamir and Schnaider are hoping to repeat their earlier success when they founded KVM distributor Qumranet, which Red Hat acquired in 2008. Tamir went on to become VP of engineering at Red Hat and Schnaider VP of development. Another Qumranet alumnus, Navin Thadani, who ran the virtualization business at Red Hat, has joined Ravello as senior VP of products.
Tuesday's launch includes the release of the public beta of Ravello's service designed to let developers simulate their existing apps to run in public and private clouds without changing them.
The company counts Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and HP's cloud services business as its initial partners.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/05/2013 at 12:48 PM