Emerging Fom Stealth, RStor Raised $45 Million

RStor entered the market with a hyper-distributed multicloud platform that enables organizations to compute, connect, and operate above the cloud.

Developed by infrastructure leaders for today’s internet giants, the RStor Multicloud Platform aggregates and automates compute resources from private data centers, public cloud providers and trusted supercomputing centers on a next generation networking fabric. Customers have a single pane of visibility into their computing and can determine the most efficient and cost-effective path for running and executing workloads.

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RStor has raised $45 million in a series A funding round, led by Cisco Investments. The company, a team of more than 50 employees, intends to use the money to grow its staff, to accelerate product development, to build out customer and partner ecosystems and to deliver on firm’s vision to securely connect the world’s computing resources.

As part of this announcement, RStor has partnered with Equinix, Inc., the global interconnection and data center company, to install the Multicloud Platform, at Equinix’s IBX data centers. RStor’s services are available to Equinix’s customers in San Jose, CA, Ashburn, VA, and in the UK, with expansion soon to follow in Hong Kong, Singapore and Brazil.

The Multicloud Platform is designed for organizations deploying applications that require HPC in the enterprise – what the firm characterizes as Enterprise Performance Computing (EPC). As businesses invest in AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics, they need EPC resources to support those applications and manage highly distributed infrastructures.

“The legacy model of the consolidated data center with its thousands of networked computers, redundant power supplies and environmental controls isn’t relevant to the computing demands of AI and machine learning. Instead, a new internet based on a distributed network, where computing happens where data lives, is what customers today demand,” said Giovanni Coglitore, founder and CEO, RStor. “Having founded Rackable Systems and led the disruption of the hardware server market, I have seen firsthand the industry gains that come from breaking open the black box of proprietary IT infrastructure. That same hunger is driving the need for a hyper-distributed platform that can manage multicloud environments to achieve greater choice and cost savings.”

The Multicloud Platform connects multicloud and hybrid IT environments in a new, secure way, to overcome the challenges of disparate systems, vendor lock-in and computing infrastructure that exists far from the sources of data.

Available, it includes three foundational services:
• Secure: By using RStor, customers have a single view into their available computing resources, whether that be an idle server in the back of the remote data center; reserved instances not being used in Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure; or the millions of core hours that were once out of reach in major supercomputing centers. RStor’s goal is to convert any x86, GPU, Power PC, ARM and Cray processor into a cloud node. It has partnered with several supercomputing facilities including San Diego Supercomputer Center, TX Advanced Computing Center, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and New Mexico Consortium as part of the offering.  
• Connect: Central to the Multicloud Platform is the company’s low-latency, high-bandwidth network fabric connecting computing resources to quickly and reliably move large data sets, while offering predictable performance and pricing. The same network can also be used to move computing power closer to where data lives. By leveraging advanced protocols, the firm is delivering performance that is up to 30x faster than industry standards.
• Orchestrate: Using machine learning and analytics, the Multicloud Platform automates and matches workloads with the right computing resources between on-premise, public cloud, and supercomputing centers. Its analytics characterize the cost and performance attributes of each cloud provider and deployment platform to provide guided selection and automated workload placement based on customer-specified governance criteria. As part of the platform, RStor has launched the first multicloud App Store with open source applications that any Singularity or Docker container can use, including TensorFlow, VASP, OpenFOAM, and dozens of others.

Together, these services form a multicloud platform that customers are already using to compute, connect, and orchestrate above the cloud. The company has also developed Data Lake, an enterprise storage service built on top of the network layer and located at the edge of the cloud. This enables organizations to make their data securely accessible to on-premise IT, public clouds and supercomputing centers.

RStor was founded in 2017 by Giovanni Coglitore, who previously founded Rackable Systems and Optical Archive. He worked at Sony and Facebook, and led the Open Compute Project, a global community of technology leaders who seek to apply the benefits of open source to hardware and increase innovation in the data center. The team includes infrastructure experts from companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox and Amazon, and has also engaged IT infrastructure expertise from data center leaders.

“Enterprise performance computing is at the intersection of HPC and the enterprise. RStor’s strategy is to make it easier and more secure to run multicloud workloads. I have been consulting with the team for over a year now and am excited at their pace of innovation,” said Shesha Krishnapura, Intel Corp.‘s fellow and IT CTO.

“Hyper-distributed network and compute resources available via the Internet are becoming invisible. Developers and users will no longer need to evaluate infrastructure. Instead, they will evaluate service provider trustworthiness and then select the best price/performance service needed to place data, run and execute their workloads,” said Carl Lehmann, principal analyst, 451 Research.

“The Data Lake on the RStor fabric is an entirely new way of thinking about cloud storage. RStor’s innovations are enabling enterprises to seamlessly manage and control their data while meeting the increasingly complex requirements of HPC and cloud environments,” said Steve Metz, VP, Samsung Semiconductor Inc.

“We are excited to partner with RStor to bring a new generation of capabilities to market,” said Taufik Ma, CEO, Attala Systems, Inc., in composable cloud infrastructure.