Fungible

Fungible Inc., established in 2015 by Pradeep Sindhu and Bertrand Serlet, was a company dedicated to revolutionizing datacenter infrastructure. Sindhu, who also founded Juniper Networks, brought extensive experience in network architecture, while Serlet, formerly Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple, contributed a deep understanding of software systems. This combination of expertise aimed to address the inefficiencies of traditional server-centric datacenters, particularly the performance bottlenecks between compute and storage resources.

The company's core business centered on the development and sale of Data Processing Units (DPUs). These specialized processors were designed to offload and accelerate data-centric workloads, such as networking, storage, and security, from the main CPU. By doing so, Fungible's technology enabled the creation of disaggregated, composable infrastructure where compute and storage resources could be pooled and provisioned on-demand, much like cloud services. The target market included hyperscale cloud providers, enterprises, and high-performance computing environments looking to enhance datacenter performance, agility, and cost-efficiency. The business model revolved around selling these DPU-powered hardware and software solutions.

Fungible's flagship product was the Fungible DPU™, a programmable, multi-core processor specifically engineered for data-centric computations at scale. This contrasted with general-purpose CPUs by focusing on executing data-path functions more efficiently. The key benefit was a significant reduction in latency and an increase in throughput for storage and networking tasks, effectively creating high-performance, secure, and scalable "virtual bare metal" datacenters. A significant milestone in the company's journey was its acquisition by Microsoft, announced in January 2023. Microsoft initiated this acquisition to leverage Fungible's technology and expertise to enhance its own datacenter infrastructure, aiming to improve performance and efficiency in areas like storage and networking.

Keywords: Data Processing Unit, DPU, datacenter infrastructure, composable systems, disaggregated infrastructure, high-performance computing, data-centric workloads, Pradeep Sindhu, Bertrand Serlet, Microsoft acquisition