CloudPhysics' cloud analytics tools win $15M as the startup sets sights on storage

CloudPhysics, a startup that has developed software for keeping tabs on the health of clusters of servers in companies’ data centers, has taken on $15 million in fresh venture capital to grow bigger.

Established in 2011, CloudPhysics has focused on providing analytics for data center operators that chop up their servers into virtual machines and maintain them with VMware’s popular vSphere software. Thousands of people have used CloudPhysics’ software since it became available to all last summer, and the startups has signed up hundreds of customers since then, co-founder and chief executive John Blumenthal told VentureBeat in an interview.

With the new funding, CloudPhysics can expand its user base — and also become more helpful, with today’s launch of CloudPhysics software for tracking companies’ data center storage resources.

The company’s new funding follows reports about investments in startups that analyze the health of the infrastructure applications depend on. Log analytics player Loggly has seen strong growth recently, and Sumo Logic raised $30 million last month.

Blumenthal believes his startup’s software goes beyond searching and indexing; it can point to the cause of a problem, he said. And now CloudPhysics is slated to answer a wider variety of questions.

Having spent more than five years running storage product management on VMware’s ESX hypervisor software for creating virtual machines, Blumenthal became painfully aware of the critical role storage plays in data center infrastructure.

“Among the most elite customers, I was finding, really, fundamentally, primitive questions remained unanswered — things like how many virtual disks can actually fit on a piece of storage that’s connected to a hypervisor,” Blumenthal said. “There’s no accurate answer to that. Even if there was an accurate answer, that answer changes the minute the environment changes.”

The idea is to provide those definitive answers — and to do so before things go haywire, by predicting problems like running out of storage or poor performance. Using the software, administrators could even answer speculative questions, like gauging the impact of caching data in fast solid-state drives without even installing that hardware.

The service appears as a highly customizable cloud-based dashboard filled with cards that display key metrics.

Looking out a bit, Blumenthal said, CloudPhysics intends to support Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor software, which would give it a wider market. New metrics on networking performance could be on the way, too.

Customers include North Shore Financial Group, Sanofi, and Zettagrid.

Jafco Ventures led the round. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mayfield Fund also participated. Previously, VMware co-founders Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum invested in CloudPhysics.

To date, Mountain View, Calif.-based CloudPhysics has raised $27.5 million, including a $10 million round last year and a $2.5 million round in 2012.

The startup employs more than 30 people, and by the end of the year that number could pass 50, Blumenthal said.