rPath Raises $10 Million in Third Round of Venture Funding

Published: July 8, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

rPath, the provider of a Linux-based software appliance creation tool and service called rBuilder, was founded by some ex-Red Hatters a little more than two years ago to get people thinking about using repository-driven software appliances in the enterprise instead of thinking about operating system, middleware, and application software as separately managed layers. It is a smart idea, which is why rPath has been able to raise three rounds of venture capital funding.

The latest round, which was announced on June 24 and which is also called Series C funding in venture capital lingo, came to $10 million and was led by the existing backers of rPath. That would be General Catalyst, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Wakefield Group, who also kicked in $9.1 million in Series B funding back in the spring of 2007. General Catalyst and North Bridge put in the $6.4 million in Series A funding as rPath was launching itself in March 2006.

While rPath Linux and the rBuilder appliance service that creates applications that run atop of it were designed to work as a pair and to create enterprise appliance software stacks--they could be and probably would be virtual servers, all patched and updated from the repository--rPath has caught the so-called "cloud computing" fever, and like so many other system management and application software providers, is now focusing on how to make rBuilder the tool to manage applications that run on clouds--what you and I would have called a computing utility until some marketeers got in here and tried to convince us that an idea that has been around for a long time is somehow new.

Last April, rPath announced that its rBuilder service could be used to deploy software on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) compute utility, which offers customers a slice of the Amazon server infrastructure for an incredible 10 cents per CPU per hour. (That is one-tenth of the list price that Sun Microsystems charges for capacity on its Sun Grid of Opteron-based servers.) The EC2 services is still in beta, as is most of this Web 2.0 stuff that people yammer on about all the time. And getting applications on and off the utility--any utility--is the tricky bit. Which is why rPath is so excited. That a recent Merill Lunch report pegs the cloud computing opportunity at $95 billion in business services and $65 billion in advertising also has rPath and its investors panting. rPath already knows how to store software stacks on Amazon's S3 storage utility and invoke them from the EC2 compute utility; the images are maintained and patched right there, on the Amazon utilities, using rBuilder patch components. rPath appliances can also be deployed inside VMware's ESX Server and Citrix Systems' Xen hypervisors on regular old servers for those old-fashioned types that like to own their own servers.

rPath is also excited that the U.S. Department of Energy, which runs the largest supercomputer labs in America, and CERN, which is operating the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, are starting to look at virtual appliances as a means of deploying applications on their giant computer clusters and grids of clusters. Generally speaking, supercomputer labs don't like hypervisor virtualization because of the overhead it imposes, which is why the rPath Linux and rBuilder approach is appealing. It would allow bare-metal performance, but perhaps rapidly shifting software stacks on the iron.

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