3Leaf Systems has received $35 million in Series C funding from a group of investors including LSI Corporation, Alloy Ventures, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Intel Capital, and Storm Ventures. 3Leaf will use the funding to speed the development of its virtualization technology and expand its sales and marketing operations.
3Leaf is among the new companies focusing on I/O virtualization for enterprise data centers. Virtualized input/output technology replaces network interface cards (NICs) and host bus adapters (HBAs) with virtual network and storage interfaces, making a single network connection appear to be multiple virtual NICs or HBAs.
"We are pleased to lead the Series C round as 3Leaf Systems continues to bring their product portfolio to the market," said Jeff Richardson, executive vice president, Networking and Storage Products Group for LSI Corporation. "As a leader in providing storage and networking building blocks that are essential to enabling today’s virtual environments, we look forward to collaborating with 3Leaf on developing the next generation of virtualization solutions for the enterprise."
3Leaf says its technologies will eventually allow companies to virtualize memory, CPU, and I/O resources of standard X86 servers, creating resource pools with mainframe-like performance from commodity machines. One of the companies testing 3Leaf’s I/O products has been managed hosting firm Savvis (SVVS). Competitors in this niche include Xsigo Systems.
3Leaf Systems is at the forefront of migrating businesses from traditional data center operations to fully virtualized environments. Using 3Leaf’s next generation virtualization products, enterprise data centers can dramatically increase their resource utilization and enhance their operational efficiency, delivering a combined savings of up to 60 percent in both capital and operational expenditures. The 3Leaf V-8000 Virtual I/O Server has been named a Best of VMworld award winner at VMworld 2007 for its innovation, value, performance, reliability and ease of use. “Businesses are migrating from traditional data center environments to a fully virtualized environment we define as the Virtual Compute Environment,” said B.V. Jagadeesh, CEO, 3Leaf Systems. “We are very excited to have LSI Corporation lead this round and also be a strategic partner to help bring next generation virtualization solutions to our customers. This additional financing by LSI and our existing investors validates 3Leaf’s vision in delivering flexible server virtualization solutions designed for enterprise data centers, addressing the dynamic business requirements of markets such as cloud computing, ecommerce and Global 2000 enterprises.”
