DriveScale, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, announced $15 million in a Series A funding for its software-defined, data center rack architecture designed to create new capabilities out of commodity components.
DriveScale’s solution, which is provided via a set of on-premises and SaaS tools, makes it easier to deploy independent pools of commodity compute and storage resources, automatically discover available assets, and combine and recombine these resources as needed.
DriveScale has been in stealth-mode for the past three years. The team includes several former executives at Sun Microsystems, including Gene Banman, Satya Nishtala, Tom Lyon, and Duane Northcutt.
Ingrasys, a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group, co-developed the DriveScale product line and is the company’s hardware equipment manufacturer.
The funding round was led by Pelion Venture Partners with participation from Nautilus Venture Partners and Foxconn’s Ingrasys.
“The time is right for a disaggregated rack scale architecture. The state of the art in ethernet switch fabrics enables wire-speed connection of pools of commodity CPU and storage resources under software control, with no loss in performance. The market opportunity for flexible scale-out infrastructure for enterprises is enormous,” said Gene Banman, CEO at DriveScale. “The whole computer industry is moving our way. It’s just a matter of time.”
