Startup Of The Week: Vizioncore Brings Backup To Virtualization

Server consolidation is just the tip of the virtualization iceberg. Do you have a plan if a virtual machine or physical hardware crashes? Do you know which business units eat up the most resources? Vizioncore is building a suite of virtualization products for high availability, disaster recovery, and management.
VIZIONCORE HEADQUARTERS: Buffalo Grove, Ill.

PRODUCTS: vRanger Pro, vReplicator

PRINCIPALS: David Bieneman, founder and CEO; Jason Mattox, VP of support and products, CTO

FUNDING: Bootstrapped

CUSTOMERS: Fujitsu, Emerson, T-Systems, Gap

WHY WILL YOU BE AROUND IN FOUR QUARTERS? CEO Bieneman plans to win in a bunch of areas, "and then in total we win in virtualization." In part, he'll do that by expanding the product line through development and partnerships. The company has signed an OEM agreement with Invirtus, which makes software to streamline physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual conversion, to optimize virtual hard drives and operating systems. BUSINESS MODEL Vizioncore software provides disaster recovery and high availability for virtual environments. The flagship vRanger Pro creates image backups and enables recovery of guest operating systems running as virtual machines. Images can be backed up to a SAN or tape and fully restored on demand. It also tracks virtual machines as they migrate to continue making backups. Other products include vReplicator, which can replicate complete VMs, and vCharter, which provides real-time VM monitoring and chargeback capabilities. THE COMPETITION PlateSpin's PowerRecon offers chargebacks and tracks VM growth, and its PowerConverter manages the migration of VMs. VKernel offers a virtual appliance for chargeback and resource monitoring. OPPORTUNITY Bieneman realized the growing adoption of VMware to consolidate servers made disaster recovery and high availability more critical, because companies would have fewer physical machines on which to rely. "We decided to create a tool to enhance backing up virtual machines," he says. Vizioncore last month said it would extend its product line beyond VMware's ESX platform. VRanger will support VirtualIron and XenSource hypervisors in the first quarter. Support for Microsoft Viridian will follow. TIMELINE