AMD completed its previously-acquisition of Pensando Systems in a transaction valued at approximately $1.9 billion.
Pensando’s distributed services platform will expand AMD’s data center product portfolio with a high-performance data processing unit (DPU) and software stack that are already deployed at scale across cloud and enterprise customers including Goldman Sachs, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. The Pensando team will join the AMD Data Center Solutions Group, led by AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager Forrest Norrod.
“The data center remains one of the largest growth opportunities for AMD. The addition of the Pensando Systems team with their hardware and software portfolio will enables us to offer cloud, enterprise and edge customers a broader portfolio of leadership compute engines that can be optimized for their specific workloads,” said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. “Pensando’s leadership DPU complements our data center product portfolio, enabling AMD to offer solutions that can significantly accelerate data transfer speeds while providing additional levels of security and analytics that will play a larger role in defining the performance of next-generation data centers.”
https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/pensando-acquisition
AMD to acquire Pensando for its DPU + software stack
AMD agreed to acquire Pensando, a Silicon Valley start-up offering a software-defined edge services platform powered by a custom packet processor, for approximately $1.9 billion before working capital and other adjustments.
Pensando (“thinking” in Spanish) is led by Cisco’s legendary “MPLS” team — Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, Soni Jiandani and Randy Pond. Its platform is designed to accelerate networking, security, storage and other services for cloud, enterprise and edge applications. Its architecture leverages the programmable packet processor distributed throughout a network to efficiently accelerate multiple infrastructure services simultaneously, offloading workloads from the CPU and increasing overall system performance. The company says it can achieve between 8x and 13x greater performance compared to competitive solutions.
Pensando claims multiple deployments at scale across cloud and enterprise customers, including Goldman Sachs, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.
CEO Prem Jain and the Pensando team will join AMD as part of the Data Center Solutions Group, led by AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager Forrest Norrod. Pensando will remain focused on executing their product and technology roadmaps, now with additional scale to accelerate their business and address growing market opportunities across a broader number of customers.
Pensado emerges from stealth, led by “MPLS” team from Cisco
Pensando Systems, a start-up based in San Jose, California, emerged from stealth to unveil its first product — a software-defined edge services platform that was developed in collaboration with the world’s largest cloud, enterprise, storage, and telecommunications companies.
Pensando (“thinking” in Spanish) is led by Cisco’s legendary “MPLS” team — Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, Soni Jiandani and Randy Pond. Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lightspeed Venture Partners led a Series C round to raise up to $145 million in funding. This will bring the total amount raised to $278 million after an earlier founder-led series A round of $71 million, and a customer-led series B round of $62 million. Cited customers, investors, and partners including HPE, Goldman Sachs, NetApp, and Equinix.
The Pensando platform is a custom programmable processor optimized to execute a software stack delivering cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services wherever data is located, all managed via its Venice Centralized Policy and Services Controller. The platform delivers highly programmable software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage, and security services wherever data is located.
The platform promises an improved security posture through distributed network protection and east-west security. It offloads networking and security functions at wire speed to dedicated accelerators, and it is designed to scale to > 1000 tenants per server and >1M routes.
The company claims its capability means that cloud providers can now gain a technological advantage over the current market leader, Amazon Web Services Nitro, delivering 5-9x improvements in productivity, performance, and scale when compared to current architectures with no risk of lock-in.
The portfolio includes:
- Naples 100 and Naples 25 cards for installation in standard servers. The Naples Distributed Services Card (DSC) delivers high-performance cloud, compute, networking, storage and security functions.
- Venice Centralized Policy and Services Controller – Centrally-managed enterprise-grade security and visibility at every level of the stack enables seamless distribution of all infrastructure services policies to active Naples nodes. In addition, Venice handles lifecycle management such as deploying in-service software upgrades to Naples nodes and delivers always-on telemetry, deep end-to-end observability, and operational simplicity across the environment.
Pensando also announced that Mark Potter, chief technology officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Barry Eggers, a partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners, joined the board of directors, with John Chambers, CEO of JC2 Ventures, leading as chairman.
