New CEO for Virtualization Startup Evergrid

Evergrid, a venture-backed startup which makes data center management software, said today board member Fred van den Bosch will become the company's chief executive officer beginning Nov. 1. Van den Bosch was formerly CEO of PANTA Systems and executive vice president and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Veritas Software.

In June Evergrid announced $10 million in Series B venture capital funding from Menlo Ventures and Acartha Group LLC. The company's software uses virtualization to manage large clusters of servers in high-performance computing (HPC) applications, monitoring the grid for errors and restarting any processes that have stalled.

"Fred's leadership in helping grow VERITAS made him our ideal candidate to help scale Evergrid," said John Jarve, managing director of Menlo Ventures and member of the Evergrid boa. "He is very familiar with Evergrid, and has extensive experience in both enterprise software and high performance computing environments."

Evergrid's virtualization software takes a slightly different approach than existing hypervisor software (like VMware and XenSource) which virtualize the operating system. Evergrid's software runs between the application and the operating system, which the company says can improve upon the performance of a hypervisor.

Evergrid is a spin-off of California Digital, a company that created two of the highest performance supercomputers. Current customers include the University of Oklahoma.

Van den Bosch has served on the Evergrid board of directors since the company was founded in 2004. During his 13-year tenure at VERITAS, he built the company's product organization from 15 to 1,500 people, and successfully managed its development partnerships with major hardware and software vendors. He said Evergrid will "soon be adding several exciting products targeting enterprise online workloads to its existing family of products, which will address the needs of batch processing applications."