MemVerge, the company behind Memory-Converged Infrastructure (MCI), has emerged from stealth and announced it raised $24.5 million in Series A funding from Gaorong Capital, Jerusalem Venture Partners, LDV Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Northern Light Venture Capital. This funding round will be used to expand its engineering, sales, and marketing teams in Silicon Valley and accelerate R&D to advance the development of MCI technology.
Founded by Charles Fan (former VMware and EMC executive), Caltech professor Jehoshua (Shuki) Bruck, and Caltech senior postdoctoral scholar Yue Li, MemVerge also recently unveiled the beta launch of the world’s first Memory-Converged system to power applications, which is essential as the ubiquity of machine-generated data characterizes modern enterprise IT workloads.
“The transformation of the data center is long overdue,” said MemVerge CEO and co-founder Charles Fan. “By eliminating the boundaries between memory and storage, our breakthrough architecture will power the most demanding AI and data science workloads today and in the future at memory speed, opening up new possibilities for data intensive computing for the enterprise.”
The MCI technology is built on top of brand new Optane DC persistent memory from Intel. Essentially, the MemVerge system collapses the memory-storage barrier so AI, IoT, and real-time analytics applications run flawlessly at memory speed without crashing.
“As more IT organizations look to leverage next-generation big data analytics in a more real-time manner to drive better business optimization and planning, it’s clear that existing storage technologies are falling short of the performance requirements,” added IDC’s research vice president of Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group Eric Burgener. “With burgeoning persistent memory technologies now becoming available from vendors like Intel, it was inevitable that someone would come up with a storage operating environment specifically designed to run in persistent memory, and that is what storage startup MemVerge has done. The vendor’s Distributed Memory Objects technology promises to meet the requirements of next-generation analytics workloads with lower latencies, more predictable performance at scale, expanded capacity, improved efficiencies and better reliability.”
There are more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day due to the machine-generated data generated from AI/ML, IoT, and analytics applications. And these high-performance workloads require an infrastructure that can process the constant flood of data produced by the on-demand economy.
This has been challenging for enterprise teams and data scientists as companies had to choose between having speed over higher capacity computing memory (or vice versa) while trying to run the world’s most demanding data-centric workloads. MemVerge’s MCI system resolves this problem by delivering memory and storage from a single distributed platform while integrating seamlessly with existing applications. And it provides 10X more memory size and 10X data I/O speed than existing solutions.
“The explosion of machine-generated data has created a massive opportunity for enterprises to gather actionable real-time insights and streamline business processes. However, AI, machine learning, IoT and data science applications place extreme demands on current IT infrastructure – workloads are prone to slowing or failing. Until now, most enterprises had to choose between more speed or more capacity, which didn’t solve the problem,” explained Gaorong Capital founding partner Bin Yue. “MemVerge has taken this need head-on. The company has a massive opportunity in being the first to market with a commercial Memory-Converged infrastructure system.”
