TidalScale

TidalScale, founded in 2012, operates in the software-defined infrastructure market, offering a solution to address the challenges of scaling applications for large, in-memory workloads. The company was started by Ike Nassi, who previously served as an Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist at SAP, along with Kleoni Ioannidou and Michael Berman. Nassi's background in the development of in-memory databases like SAP HANA informed the company's direction, aiming to overcome the physical limitations of how much memory a single server can access. Gary Smerdon joined as President and CEO in 2016.

The core of TidalScale's business is its software-defined server technology, which aggregates the CPU cores, memory, and I/O of multiple commodity servers, making them function as a single, large virtual server. This approach, termed "inverse virtualization," allows organizations to create a system with a massive memory pool without rewriting existing applications or changing the operating system. The technology is designed for enterprises with data-intensive, mission-critical applications that would otherwise require expensive, monolithic "scale-up" servers, such as those running large databases (e.g., Oracle, SAP HANA), analytics, or data mining operations. By using standard off-the-shelf hardware, the company posits a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for its clients.

TidalScale's product is a software solution that sits between the hardware and the operating system. A key feature is its use of machine learning to continuously optimize the allocation of virtualized resources like vCPUs and memory pages across the cluster of physical servers to enhance performance. A patented feature called TidalGuard monitors the health of the physical servers, enabling failing hardware to be hot-swapped without system downtime. This capability reportedly adds "two nines" to overall system uptime and allows for maintenance and security updates with zero downtime. The platform runs on-premises or in public clouds like AWS and IBM Cloud, aggregating multiple bare-metal instances into a single virtual server. The company has secured significant funding from investors including Bain Capital Ventures, Infosys, SK Hynix, and Sapphire Ventures, raising a total of $91.3 million over nine rounds.

Keywords: software-defined server, inverse virtualization, in-memory computing, big data infrastructure, server aggregation, virtual machine, scale-up computing, data center optimization, high-performance computing, large-scale database, workload consolidation, IT infrastructure, cloud computing, bare metal virtualization, system scalability, enterprise software, data-intensive applications, TCO reduction, hardware virtualization, cluster computing