While commodity servers are great for scaling out, they don't scale up. TidalScale is looking to fix that.
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
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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— Mitch Wagner 
Editor, Enterprise Cloud News
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