Quest Software Adds To Management Arsenal With vKernel Acquisition
VKernel's flagship product is vOperations Suite, an enterprise-focused performance and capacity management and remediation tool for Microsoft Hyper-V and vSphere environments. VKernel will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary of Quest Software, based in Aliso Viejo, Calif.
Quest earlier this month held its first-ever channel partner conference, sharing with VARs its plan for integrating its data protection applications into a single platform for backup and recovery of both physical and virtualized infrastructure.
Quest is pursuing a channel-only strategy for its data protection software platform, which includes products and technology from its 2008 acquisition of Vizioncore and from its $55 million acquisition of BakBone, a developer of storage data protection technology, in January.
Virtualization management is hot technology and the space has seen a number of high profile acquisitions in the past year. NetApp in February paid $60 million to acquire Littleton, Mass.-based Akorri, a developer of performance capacity analytics software for virtual and physical server and storage infrastructure. In January, Solarwinds, an Austin, Texas-based IT management software vendor, acquired virtualization management startup Hyper9.
vKernel is the sixth company Quest Software has acquired this year. In addition to BakBone, Quest has also acquired eDMZ Security, RemoteScan (scanner virtualization), Symlabs (identity management) and ChangeBASE (analysis and management).