Nimboxx Raised $12 Million in Series A

NIMBOXX, Inc. unveiled its ‘atomic unit’ of the software-defined data center, an all-in-one solution that puts a hyper-scale computing model within reach for organizations of all sizes.

The company also announced it has raised $12 million in Series A funding from SMC Holdings, a Hong Kong-based institutional investor with a track record in backing U.S. technology companies.
 
The data center is undergoing a transformation. Legacy data center models are not equipped to enable modern elastic computing, 20-year old storage architectures no longer scale to meet data demands, and virtualization has become commoditized. Cloud providers such as Amazon and Google have employed a new data center paradigm, building software-defined data centers to deliver massively scalable services with efficiency that few others can match.
 
NIMBOXX brings these same benefits to organizations, delivering simplicity and a new standard of performance while reducing overall data center costs by more than 40%.

 The architecture

 
With a single platform that converges servers, storage, networking and security, NIMBOXX helps organizations bridge the gap from legacy virtualization environments to an elastic compute platform. The solution features mesh-based scale out, dynamic storage orchestration, self-balancing workload heuristics, and a shared-nothing management model. It also provides dynamic adaptation to cache and storage changes based on multi-dimensional workload analyses. Deployments can start with a single node and scale to hundreds.
 
“The value of consuming infrastructure that is preconfigured and validated is building momentum within the IT community as ESG recently discovered, with one-third of respondent organizations already deployed, while an additional 44% have plans for, or interest in these types of solutions,” said Mark Bowker, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “IT organizations are recognizing benefits that include ease of ongoing management, improved scalability, reduced deployment times, simplified initial deployments and improved TCO. NIMBOXX has the potential to deliver these benefits to organizations of all sizes.“
 
Unlike competitive solutions that run in a VM on third-party hypervisors, NIMBOXX has built the entire stack. The NIMBOXX Mesh OS installs on bare metal and allows for direct control over all hardware resources. This approach enables software-defined data center functionality and delivers performance improvements. MeshOS also offers a RESTful API for integration with third-party applications.

Recent pilot customers have reported:

• 180,000 IO/s generated from a 1U system with factory settings
• Average of 10x improvement in application performance
• 7mn to go from initial configuration to VMs up and running
• Up to 60% reduction in overall solution management
• Up to 40% reduction in overall data center costs
• Third-party integrations for security and VDI

“NIMBOXX’s strategy to take ownership of the entire stack is a truly unique and different approach to today’s virtualization needs and challenges. They took what has always been a diverse mixtureof cobbled together, segregated appliances and methodologies and created a streamlined, purpose-built, power-driven appliance that achieves the same tasks and goals at a fraction of the cost and footprint. In working with the platform, I experienced 180,000 IO/s in repeated benchmark tests. The only thing more impressive than outstanding performance was that it took less than 10 minutes to go from un-box to completed configuration set up the very first time,” said Aaron Kent, IT director, Fulghum Industries, Inc. “For the first time in our industry, NIMBOXX presents an opportunity for companies of all sizes and IT budgets, to operate a software-defined virtualized server infrastructure on par with the largest companies we know.”
 
Founded by a team of seasoned virtualization, storage, networking and security experts, NIMBOXX’s software-defined approach is applicable in all data centers where virtualization is planned or implemented. The company will initially sell to technology vendors delivering I/O-intensive applications, service providers delivering hosted private cloud and on-premises solutions, key segments of the mid market, and enterprises with big data applications.
 
“In the not-too-distant future, this will be recognized as a key step in the transformation that’s happening in the data center today,” said Rocky Bullock, CEO, NIMBOXX. “Hyper-convergence vendors have come before us, but we’ve taken an entirely different approach, building the entire software-defined data center stack from the bottom up. Our pilot results speak for themselves – the benefits of this approach are indisputable.”

NIMBOXX systems are available.

The start-up is headquartered in Austin, TX.