This week’s Smart Infrastructure roundup features expansion goals and funding for a fresh crop of automation and analytics companies.

Puppet Labs expands automation offering

IT automation software company Puppet Labs introduced the Puppet Supported Program earlier this week.  The program allows customers to extend the benefits of automation across their data center, speeding application delivery using a central solution to automate servers, software, as well as network and storage devices.

By integrating Puppet Enterprise to network and storage devices, Puppet Labs looks to extend efficiency and agility that cloud computing and virtualization can deliver. The goal here is to build the infrastructure and best practices to deliver better software faster to customers.

Puppet Labs is certifying Puppet Enterprise for platforms and devices the new program launched in partnership with Arista Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Cumulus Networks, Dell, EMC, F5, Huawei and NetApp.

The company also recently closed a $40 million round of funding from Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Triangle Peak Partners, True Ventures and VMware.  The round of funding will be used to aggressively invest in technologies and products across a wider swath of the market.

CloudPhysics launches Storage Analytics

CloudPhysics, a company that provides predictive analytics for virtual datacenter management, made two major announcements this week.  First, it has secured $15 million in Series C funding in a round led by venture capital firm Jafco Ventures with participation of existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mayfield.  The round of funding will be used to expand go-to-market activities and scale the company’s business.

The second announcement is the general availability of Storage Analytics, new capabilities in CloudPhysics’ flagship product that will allow IT teams to pinpoint and preempt storage-induced capacity and performance problems with data-driven, actionable insight.  The company also introduced Smart Alerts, which is described as a “groundbreaking new feature that shifts the focus of alerting from reactive to predictive.”  Using Big Data analytics, CloudPhysics leverages insights from its global dataset to predict capacity or performance problems in a customer’s datacenter, triggering a Smart Alert containing recommendations for preemptive actions.

“With our new release, we’ve doubled down on storage, providing storage-focused analytics that cut through the layers of complexity and provide answers IT teams need to prevent storage-induced downtime, optimize capacity and keep their virtual datacenters healthy and operating with Google-like operational efficiency,” said John Blumenthal, co-founder and CEO of CloudPhysics.

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