Start-Up Pancetera Created by Former Data Domain Executives

Pancetera Software, Inc., provider of virtual storage optimization solutions, unveiled Pancetera Unite, a virtual appliance that offers a new way to reduce the impact of management tasks in virtual environments, including backup, replication, security scanning, and WAN mobility.

Available today, Pancetera Unite solves storage problems that challenge organizations using virtualized environments, by reducing complexity and cost while enhancing reliability and network performance.

"The proliferation of desktop virtualization has led to some challenges as organizations consolidate virtual machines (VMs)," said Patrick Harr, vice president, desktop solutions, VMware. "Pancetera’s approach minimizes the impact of backup, replication, off-line VDI and security scans for virtual desktops in VMware View environments. The combined solution helps customers eliminate previous cost and complexity challenges related to desktop virtualization by providing more efficient VM consolidation."

Pancetera also announced it has recently closed its first round of funding from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and ONSET Ventures, and that Henrik Rosendahl has been appointed as chief executive officer. Previously CEO of Thinstall, which was sold to VMware, Rosendahl now leads a team of former Data Domain and Legato Systems executives with broad experience in the storage, virtualization, data management, and enterprise software industries.

"IT organizations are moving aggressively toward virtualization for all the right reasons. But the trend is bringing an incredible amount of complexity in its wake," said Shomit Ghose, partner, ONSET Ventures. "Pancetera’s products uniquely eliminate this complexity and yield substantial cost savings to the organizations that are deploying virtual machines (VMs). It’s a really big business opportunity."

Eliminate Storage Management Complexity
Managing numerous workloads in virtual environments can be complex, time consuming, and expensive, and can interfere with production performance. Pancetera Unite offloads the production servers, making the environment simpler and more efficient to manage. Installing as a virtual appliance in minutes, Pancetera Unite provides a single access point for VMs. All agent operations and other household workloads – backup, security scans, replication and storage migration over the LAN or WAN – are performed through Unite.

"Virtualization has allowed us to build smarter and to be more responsive as an IT team," said Logan Lemming, director of IT, El Dorado County Office of Education. "However, using virtualization technology also dropped an iron curtain around my storage, not allowing me to interact with my VM file systems, and forcing me to use expensive and complex agent-based backup software. Pancetera Unite blows that whole paradigm away. With Pancetera Unite, my environment is unlocked again. I can interact directly with my virtual file system, determining when and how to backup my systems depending on my organization’s needs, not which features I’ve licensed. I am no longer handcuffed to a certain storage or backup vendor to maintain the integrity of my virtual infrastructure. Pancetera Unite is the silver bullet that we in the virtualization world have been waiting for."

More features of Pancetera Unite:

• SmartView technology provides a single, unified view of all virtual storage – across hypervisors and data stores. Administrators can browse, move, and copy virtual machine files as easily as browsing a Windows network drive.
• SmartView provides access to all running VMs and their associated files for backup, replication, archiving, security scanning, search, data loss prevention (DLP), and others. Existing applications can simply access the virtual machines with little or no integration needed.
• SmartRead technology measurably reduces storage I/O, leading to more efficient utilization of existing storage. Running backup streams through Pancetera can reduce I/O load by as much as 80 percent.