VirtenSys Raised $16 million

VirtenSys Ltd., in delivering innovative PCI Express-based I/O Virtualization (IOV) switches for data centers, has received $16 million in new funding. The funding follows strong customer and end-user traction for the company’s I/O virtualization products, and will be used to grow the company’s revenues and broaden its markets and operations worldwide. Participation in the series C funding round included all of the existing investors: Scottish Equity Partners (SEP), Celtic House Venture Partners (CHVP), and Gimv.

"We have been with the company since the beginning, and we are pleased to see VirtenSys solutions getting so much demand at key server customers," said Tom Valis, partner at Celtic House. "When we make investments, we look for companies that pursue fundamental innovation as a path to delivering exceptional value in the Information Communications Technology (ICT) sector. VirtenSys has brought to market a product at the right time to serve as a platform to optimize server networking and storage connectivity, and become a catalyst to the next-generation green IT data centers."

"VirtenSys’ momentum in the market has been very strong and the customers’ feedback has been excellent. Its I/O Virtualization solutions complement standard and virtualized operating systems, and enable faster and easier deployments of traditional and cloud-based applications and services," said Alex Brabers, executive vice president at Gimv. "This financing is a strong validation of the company?s experienced management team, its differentiated technology, and the great potential that we see in it."
 
"With data centers rapidly adopting server virtualization in the pursuit of increased efficiency and simplified manageability, I/O has become a critical bottleneck. VirtenSys’ products solve real needs today and are unique in providing non-disruptive solutions that can be deployed immediately," said Stuart Paterson, partner at SEP. "Gartner estimates the I/O Virtualization switch opportunity to be worth more than US$4 billion per year. The customers? demand for the company’s products is very impressive and encompasses multiple vertical markets."

"I am excited by the vote of confidence from our investors and by the breakthrough technology and unique solution that the VirtenSys team developed," said Ahmet Houssein, president and CEO at VirtenSys. "This funding round follows on the heel of successes at multiple server OEM customers and channel partners, and further signifies the general recognition of the VirtenSys I/O virtualization products as the industry?s best price/performance and lowest energy-usage solutions for the I/O bottleneck in data centers."

Earlier this month, the company announced that its IOV switches support Ethernet, SAS/SATA and Fibre Channel, providing servers with the most economical and energy efficient connectivity to local area networks (LAN), and the storage infrastructures, including direct-attached storage (DAS) and storage area networks (SAN). With this announcement, VirtenSys became the first company to consolidate and optimize the most commonly deployed networking and storage connectivity in servers. VirtenSys IOV switches create virtualized I/O Clouds where servers’ I/O resources are pooled, consolidated, and dynamically allocated on demand based on application needs. The IOV systems dramatically reduce data center operational expense and complexity, improve I/O utilization to greater than 80 percent, enhance throughput, halve equipment cost and reduce I/O power consumption by more than 60 percent.