NetCitadel Co-Founder and Chief Engineer Vadim Kurland’s experience on Google’s network-operations team inspired the new product, said Mike Horn, NetCitadel’s CEO and another co-founder. As is the case with other companies operating large data centers, Google’s cloud infrastructure was often in flux. “They’re really these dynamic environments that are changing frequently,” Horn said. As Kurland developed network security to fit the Google infrastructure, he figured other companies faced similar challenges and might want external providers to take care of that responsibility, Horn said.

The process of rolling out a security update over a security network is tedious. For example, a system administrator must find out about a firewall change request, such as adding another server. Then he or she needs to figure out the impact of the change, update the firewall or firewalls, deploy the change and make sure everything was done correctly.

Enter NetCitadel’s Security Orchestration Platform, a virtual appliance that automates that process, Horn said. As a result, network-security staff can focus on more critical matters than manual, time-consuming policy changes. Besides firewalls, the Security Orchestration Platform can also manage a network’s routers and switches.

Comparable offerings from Cisco and Juniper Networks support only cloud instances but not virtualization, or vice-versa, and they don’t accommodate network-security devices from other suppliers, Horn said.

NetCitadel was formed in 2010 and raised capital from venture-capital company NEA in 2011 – Horn wouldn’t say how much. It has since taken on 25 employees. Current customers include financial-services institutions, retailers and a university, Horn said. An annual subscription costs $25,000 or more per year.

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Virtual appliances are bundles of software and “just enough operating system,” as rPath chief evangelist Marty Wesley puts it, to make them run. Software destined for an appliance comes in the form of distributions (such as Red Hat’s RPM format) that contain the code and related libraries. rPath’s tool first teases apart these distributions and identifies their components.

Armed with a list of what needs to go into the appliance, the tool then tailors it to the target cloud or virtual machine. “We grab the contents [of the distribution] and add them to a cart,” said Wesley. For example, if the appliance is destined for VMware, rPath adds code specific to that environment; for EC2, it leaves out the kernel and requests EC2 credentials. Finally, the system publishes the results to a variety of environments.

The Raleigh, N.C.-based startup is filled with Red Hat alumni, including CTO Erik Troan, who authored the Red Hat software packaging system RPM. rPath is seeing modest growth from its enterprise offering, claiming 58 customers since its launch in 2006, many of whom are large enterprises or ISVs who want to ship VM-ready versions of their software. The company has taken in a total of $25 million in funding, with a $15 million round completed this April, and has 25 engineers. Both CohesiveFT and FastScale are competitors, although they don’t support as many target environments; JumpBox, meanwhile, makes pre-built appliances for many popular applications.

But rPath is at a crossroads. If it wants to own the enterprise release management cycle, it needs more than just Linux RPM distributions. Here, Microsoft is just around the corner with its suite of virtualization, operating systems, and applications.

On the other hand, if rPath wants to focus on clouds with its catalog of appliances, it needs to move beyond individual machines and into scalable, multimachine application clusters. Wesley says the company is already pursuing this, but cloud management firms Elastra, 3Tera and Enomalism have a head start, offering management, scaling and licensing tools for virtual machines.

Whatever the bumps ahead, rPath’s portal and new EC2 support is a reminder of just how easily and quickly companies can move applications into an on-demand environment and free software from its underlying platform.

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