Four Years in the Making, and Backed by $78M in Financing, Designed System Meets Growing Demand for Cloud Ownership
Oxide Computer Company today unveiled the world’s first commercial Cloud Computer, a true rack-scale system with fully unified hardware and software designed for on-premises cloud computing. The company also announced a $44 million Series A financing round led by Eclipse with participation from Intel Capital, Riot Ventures, Counterpart Ventures, and Rally Ventures to accelerate production for Fortune 1000 enterprises. This brings the company’s total financing raised to date to $78 million.
The New Economics of Cloud Ownership
Despite the rapid rise of cloud computing, the vast majority of IT infrastructure today continues to live outside the public cloud in on-premises data centers, where enterprises are forced to cobble together a set of disjointed hardware and software components to run their businesses. Since its inception, Oxide’s mission has been to solve this problem, developing the first unified product that delivers the developer experience and operational efficiencies of the public cloud to on-premises environments.
“Cloud computing has been at the foundation of digital transformation, and yet it remains restricted to a centralized, rental-only model. Every enterprise today has financial, security, latency, and reliability needs that require them to own their computing infrastructure and the rental-only model has denied them modern cloud capabilities for these use cases. We are changing that,” said Steve Tuck, CEO and co-founder of Oxide.
“Oxide addresses the most urgent needs of stakeholders in enterprise IT. They have eliminated the trade-off between cloud and on-premises so enterprises can achieve cloud performance across every aspect of their business,” said Andy Fligel, Senior Managing Director at Intel Capital. “Oxide makes it possible to ‘own the cloud’ instead of renting it—a concept that could shift the economics of cloud computing.”
“Oxide essentially wrapped all the hopes and dreams of a software engineer, IT manager, and a CFO into a single box. It’s best-in-class infrastructure with a clear and obvious ROI,” said Will Coffield, Partner at Riot Ventures, an Oxide investor. ”Oxide provides the first alternative to the public cloud that doesn’t require any sacrifices. There is a massive market for this, and Oxide assembled an Avengers team to pull this off.”
Unified Hardware & Software
Oxide recognized four years ago that to deliver a world-class cloud infrastructure product, every aspect of the hardware and software stack needed to be redesigned and rebuilt. Co-founders Steve Tuck and Bryan Cantrill, armed with decades of cloud infrastructure experience at Dell, Sun Microsystems, and Joyent, assembled a band of 60 veteran technologists skilled in software, mechanical, electrical, and industrial engineering to take on this challenge and transform the most fundamental corner of computing.
“After years of building cloud infrastructure, we knew firsthand the pain of on-premises deployments, and we knew that addressing these pain points would require taking on the entire problem of the rack-scale computer – hardware and software,” said Bryan Cantrill, CTO and co-founder of Oxide. “While we were not the only ones to see this, many believed that the problem was too daunting for a new company: despite the large market, the conventional wisdom was that one simply couldn’t find the investors and technologists necessary to fund, design, and build it. We had the audacity to prove that thinking to be wrong.”
“Successfully combining rack-scale hardware innovations with deeply integrated cloud software is nothing short of a massive engineering feat — and one that can’t be solved with a single engineering breakthrough alone,” said Seth Winterroth, Partner at Eclipse. “The Oxide team meticulously rethought and re-tooled every single layer, node, and resource of the entire technology stack, from deep within hardware to the software interfaces. This milestone marks the start of a paradigm shift in the world of IT — Steve, Bryan, and the Oxide team are ushering in and defining an entirely new category in IT.”
Instant IT Transformation
The Oxide Cloud Computer’s networking, compute and storage capabilities are purpose-built to deliver hyperscale cloud computing to on-premises data centers. The Cloud Computer significantly improves energy efficiency over traditional servers; uses less space than traditional on-premises infrastructure; ships complete with all the software required to run full cloud computing services; and requires no assembly. The net result is that Oxide customers can go from rack install to developer availability in a matter of hours, compared to weeks or months.
Oxide empowers developers to build, run, and operate any application with enhanced security, latency, and control, and frees enterprises to up-level IT operations and accelerate strategic initiatives. Oxide customers include the Idaho National Laboratory as well as a global financial services organization. Additional installments at Fortune 1000 enterprises will be completed in the coming months.
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