The Mesh is The Access Point

Adding to an initial round of bridge funding by Google, Mountain View based Meraki this week announced that it closed a $5 million series A led by Sequoia Capital. Meraki has a low cost wireless access point product that doubles as a mesh router. 

Their technology joins FON and Whisher in bringing shared wireless access to communities, and is grounded in a MIT Ph.D. research project that provided wireless access to graduate students.

Acquisitions

Akamai Technnologies acquired application acceleration competitor Netli for close to $178 million. Red Herring has the full story here.

Network Solutions, a provider of online services for small businesses, passed hands again, agreeing to be acquired by General Atlantic, a private equity firm with about $12 billion in capital under management. 

Funding 

Two open source network management software companies, Groundwork Open Source, and SolarWinds,  separately raised venture funding this week. GroundWork, which develops software that is an extension of an open source monitoring application Nagios, raised $12.5 series C while SolarWinds raised $7.5 million

In the datacenter space, Q-Layer, a Belgian provider of virtualization management software for commercial data centers, announced that it closed a € 7 million ($ 9 million) round. The company 

    "leverages technology introduced by VMWare, Microsoft and Xen to create a real time infrastructure which is agile, policy driven and which supports the business processes of the enterprise by providing resources in minutes only."

    " Qlayer brings together three virtualization technologies into a single, easy to use platform: server virtualization, network virtualization and storage virtualization. This platform is completed with Qlayer’s revolutionary components: QSan, QImage, QReplicate and QNetwork."

In the wireless space, WiMax chip maker Beceem Communications announced that it raised  a $40 million series D, bringing its total venture funding to $90 million till date.

Texas based mobile networking startup Tango Networks announced that it completed its first round of funding, totaling $25 million, from Motorola's venture capital arm. Tango provides technology to bridge enterprise PBXs with employees’ mobile phones.