Packet, a NY startup that provides fast modular bare-metal server infrastructure to build a proprietor cloud from scratch, just announced $9.4 million in a Series A funding round led by Softbank. There are two things that captured my eye in this announcement:
- A tiny startup taking on the huge but declining market segment dominated by big guns, like HPE, Dell, Lenovo, Cisco, Rackspace, etc.
- The funding company is Softbank, a Japanese group with imperial ambitions, that recently made headlines with its acquisition of ARM.
What is so special in these two facts? Packet develops bare metal Intel Atom microserver, a low-cost low-energy consumption workhorse of highly affordable data centers, touted as a future of low performance computing market. In 2012 AMD had acquired microserver startup SeaMicro for $334 Million, only to drop its entire microserver business operation three years later. My guess is that Softbank sees future in getting a foothold in the microserver market to integrate, at some later stage, highly energy efficient ARM processors in microservers.
What is also interesting about Packet’s infrastructure is its integration with the DevOps ecosystem.
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