VMware Acquires Database Vendor Continuent To Give Its Hybrid Cloud A Boost

VMware said Wednesday it has acquired the assets of Continuent, a database clustering and replication vendor, and plans to integrate the technology with its vCloud Air public cloud.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Continuent, of San Jose, Calif., has raised $5.8 million in funding since its founding in 2004.

Continuent's advanced clustering and replication technology can be used for "high availability, disaster recovery, multi-master operation and real-time data warehouse loading to MySQL," Ajay Patel, vice president of hybrid cloud application services at VMware, said in a blog post Wednesday.

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Continuent also works with Hadoop, Oracle and Amazon Redshift for transaction processing and analytics, Patel said. Its employees will join VMware’s hybrid cloud business unit, run by Bill Fathers, senior vice president and general manager.

VMware plans to continue selling Continuent's flagship Tungsten product, Patel said. Continuent also has an open source data replication engine for MySQL and Oracle, called Tungsten Replicator, according to Patel.

Jamie Shepard, regional and health systems senior vice president at Lumenate, a Dallas-based VMware partner, said Continuent Tungsten is a less expensive alternative to Oracle's GoldenGate database replication product.

In acquiring Continuent, VMware is targeting the needs of application owners directly, as opposed to the traditional approach of selling to IT departments, Shepard said.

"This opens us up to an entirely new customer base within our customer base," said Shepard.

In addition to vCloud Air, VMware is planning to incorporate Continuent's technology into other software-defined data center products, Patel said in the blog post.

"VMware understands the value of data to businesses. They share our vision of managing an integrated fabric of standard DBMS platforms, both in public clouds as well as in local data centers," Continuent CEO Robert Hodges said in a blog post Wednesday.

VMware is working on a Database-as-a-Service offering that will initially support Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, as well as a disaster recovery service for on-premise databases. Continuent's technology could be a fit for both services.

VMware has been steadily adding open source technologies to its portfolio in recent years, and at VMworld in August, it rolled out its first OpenStack distribution. VMware joined the OpenStack Foundation two years ago, shortly after its $1.2 billion acquisition of software-defined networking startup Nicira.

PUBLISHED OCT. 29, 2014