IT pros interested in private clouds will find an array of vendors with tools to build and manage them, from niche players such as Cassatt and Egenera to big names such as VMware. Here are three startups focused on building private clouds, each with a few notable customers and experienced management. The ranks of startups, however, are growing fast in this market.

• Zimory, a spin-off of Deutsche Telecom Labs, has come out with a management layer for running Citrix's XenServer, VMware's ESX Server, and, eventually, Microsoft's Hyper-V virtual machines as resources within an enterprise cloud.

• FastScale's Composer Suite discovers application dependencies, then configures an operating system and software stack to run with the application in your data center. The service can be used to generate VM templates that are maintained and updated by FastScale but downloaded for operation in your internal cloud. FastScale promises smaller VMs than those built internally because its automated configuration system can determine what parts of the operating system aren't needed by the application.

• Surgient, founded in 2003, was one of the first companies to focus on virtual lab management, or providing the software to generate a variety of VMs to be used by software developers and testers as the target environment for their code. It was a way of test driving code and finding out where it broke--before putting it into production. Its Virtual Automation Platform now has the self-service provisioning, usage monitoring, and chargeback features for any kind of user, a system needed to implement a cloud internally.

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