Diamanti (Datawise.io) Out of Stealth With $12.5 Million in Funding

Diamanti, a new start-up (formerly known as Datawise.io in stealth) founded by converged infrastructure experts from Cisco, Veritas, and VMware, exited stealth and announced beta availability of the industry’s first turnkey networking and storage appliance that brings guaranteed performance levels to Linux containers such as Docker – a major requirement in containers’ progression from developer sandbox to production deployment.

Diamanti also announced the close of a $12.5 million Series A venture funding round from CRV, DFJ Venture, GSR Ventures, and Goldman Sachs.

“Diamanti was founded to solve network and storage challenges in Linux containerized environments,” said Jeff Chou, Diamanti co-founder and CEO. “Diamanti’s guiding philosophy is that solving IO challenges demands converged networking and storage. We have assembled the best talent and broadest team with the vision of building a great company around Linux containers, the biggest technology disruption since virtualization, transforming how applications and infrastructure are designed, deployed and managed.“

On-demand access to fast, predictable data services
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Deploying containers from developer machines to production-scale requires specialized expertise and complex manual processes. On the networking side, containerized applications impose convoluted integration for connectivity. On the storage side, application agility has outpaced data tier agility, requiring organizations to substantially over-provision and custom engineer their container infrastructure.

“NBCUniversal delivers responsive, compelling media experiences to our users,” said Ramana Mantravadi, SVP and CTO, NBCUniversal Digital Products and Interactive Media. “Our DevOps team searched for a way to effectively scale our applications without sacrificing performance or driving up cost as we deliver new media services. Diamanti lets us focus on building and deploying unique media offerings faster than ever.”

Diamanti’s converged appliance addresses infrastructure problems that developers and operators face when deploying containers in production. The solution’s software-defined controls, which Diamanti has contributed to Google’s Kubernetes open source project, empower developers to specify their network and storage resources and service levels. The appliance includes network and storage innovations that deliver guaranteed performance levels with 10X latency and throughput improvements. It also plugs seamlessly into existing infrastructure and is simple to deploy, manage, and scale for operators.

“Red Hat firmly believes in the power of containers to transform application delivery and deployment,” said Ashesh Badani, VP, OpenShift, Red Hat, Inc. “We’ve been thrilled to collaborate with Diamanti to deliver their new appliance on OpenShift, Red Hat’s container application platform, and look forward to continued collaboration to drive industry adoption of containers.”

Diamanti brings ease of use and guaranteed performance for containers to the $10.6 billion converged infrastructure market. Gartner predicts at least 50% of new workloads by 2018 will be deployed into containers in at least one stage of the application life cycle

Diamanti’s contributions to Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration project, include key enhancements that open the door to flexible, predictable container networking and storage. The recently announced submissions have been accepted for the 1.2 release of Kubernetes. Diamanti’s FlexVolume contribution automates IO configuration based on user-defined requirements. Diamanti’s scheduler contribution enables the Kubernetes scheduler to factor storage and networking requirements when placing workloads, leveraging a declarative model for developers and container administrators.

“Developers everywhere are adopting containers to more rapidly get their applications from concept to production,” said David Aronchick, Kubernetes product manager. “Kubernetes was created to help organizations bring applications to production and run distributed systems at scale. We are excited to have Diamanti add their expertise in networking and storage to the Kubernetes community, and help make deploying, scaling, and managing distributed applications available to organizations of all sizes.”