While commodity servers are great for scaling out, they don't scale up. TidalScale is looking to fix that.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

July 18, 2017

2 Min Read
Startup TidalScale Scales Up Commodity Servers

Startup TidalScale is looking to solve the problem of using racks of commodity servers for high-performance computing, such as simulation, retail and financial analytics, bioinformatics and more.

"The problem we are trying to solve is a flexible way of handling unpredictable, variable-sized workloads with in-memory performance," Chuck Piercey, TidalScale co-founder and product manager, tells Enterprise Cloud News.

Commodity servers are great for scaling out, but lousy for scaling up -- for running high-performance computing applications.

Figure 1: Photo from Max Pixel Photo from Max Pixel

TidalScale is looking to change that with technology that it calls "Software-Defined Servers," allowing a rack of servers to appear as a single virtual machine to applications.

The TidalScale software is different from virtualization software like VMware vSphere in that those run virtual servers on individual machines, while TidalScale pools multiple physical machines into a single virtual server. TidalScale is different from conventional private clouds in that TidalScale will run software that's designed to run on individual servers; it doesn't require containers or other cloud-native application architectures.

The Software-Defined Server software has been available since early this year. On Tuesday, TidalScale is introducing WaveRunner, a control panel to build, allocate, and manage Software-Defined Servers -- which the company calls TidalPods -- to increase flexibility and scalability in today's data centers.

WaveRunner incorporates RESTful APIs, to integrate TidalScale with third-party REST-compliant testing and data integration platforms and tools, such as Jenkins and Docker.

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TidalScale is also improving HyperKernel, the basis for the Software-Defined Server platform, doubling CPU scalability and performance.

TidalScale has been implemented by manufacturers, financial services companies, automakers and researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

TidalScale is four years old, with 26 employees, based in Campbell, Calif. It has received just short of $20 million funding, and plans a Series B round early next year. Backers include Hummer-Winblad, Bain Capital, SAP Sapphire Ventures, Samsung, Citrix and Infosys.

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About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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