Pensando Systems Exits Stealth Mode With Plans To Take On Amazon AWS

While normally we don't cover hardware start-ups on Phoronix, Pensando Systems has just exited stealth and given their focus will be heavily involved with Linux and in fact already have their first kernel driver mainlined.

After announcing a $145 million (USD) Series-C round, Pensando Systems exited "stealth" and revealed the first details of what they are trying to achieve with this company led by many ex-Cisco staff.

From their announcement:

The Pensando platform delivers highly programmable software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services wherever data is located. This unique capability means that cloud providers can now gain a technological advantage over the current market leader, Amazon Web Services Nitro, delivering 5-9x improvements in productivity, performance and scale when compared to current architectures with no risk of lock-in.

In addition, existing enterprises can transform their current infrastructure into a cloud-like environment, eliminating multiple legacy appliances, improving operational simplicity and security while at the same time delivering never before seen functionality, performance, cost, scale and observability.

Pensando is the first secure, programmable, edge-accelerated platform that directly addresses the generational shift occurring as data pushes to the edge of the cloud. The foundation of the Pensando platform is a custom, fully-programmable processor optimized to execute a software stack delivering cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services wherever data is located.

They are claiming 5-9x current industry performance / scalability / latency / jitter, software-defined always-on services, best in class security, and 1/3rd the power usage of existing solutions.

Pensando has been on our radar since as I wrote about last month when they were just a stealth networking startup they already upstreamed their first Linux kernel driver. In the Linux 5.4 kernel is a Pensando "Ionic" driver for a family of network adapters. In this week's press release, Pensando didn't specifically call out Ionic but presumably is the backbone to their hardware. Now that they are beginning to talk about their ambitions, hopefully we see more Linux kernel patches from them soon.