2019 was a record year for Liqid, with the company achieving milestones in technology, customer and partner acquisition, industry presence, team expansion, and investor interest. Check out this recap of the year and get a better sense of what we’ve got planned for our next trip around the sun!
And oh! Our COO Bryan Schramm won Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the Mountain Desert Region! Congratulations, Bryan!
Business & Partnerships
In Q4, we were excited to announce Liqid has raised $28 million in Series B funding led by Panorama Point Partners, with participation from Iron Gate Capital, and affiliates of DH Capital. You can read more about it in these articles from VentureBeat and The Next Platform. Liqid will use the funding round to accelerate growth and productization.
This year we were also pleased to announce an OEM collaboration with Dell Technologies OEM & IoT Solutions to provide composable infrastructure solutions to enterprises across geographies and verticals. Given Dell EMC’s status as the world’s leading server provider by volume, the agreement enables Liqid to extend the reach of its composable infrastructure technology to a far wider array of geographies and industry verticals. Go to ZDNet for additional insights.
In addition, Liqid partnered with virtualization solutions provider ScaleMP to provide software-defined appliances and NVMe solutions for in-memory workloads that extend beyond traditional server memory limitations and expand total system memory by order of magnitude over traditional installed DRAM, without any operating system or application modifications.
The new systems leverage are capable of scaling memory up to 12TB in a single enclosure, delivering powerful ideal in-memory computing for applications such as Oracle TimesTen and In-Memory Column Store, SAP HANA, DB2 BLU, Apache Spark, Aerospike DBS, and other memory-intensive applications.
Liqid also built on existing relationships with Intel, NVIDIA, Inspur, Phison Electronics, One Stop Systems, Broadcom, Toshiba, and other industry leaders.
Technology Advancements & Industry Presence
Composable infrastructure
Liqid’s advancements of our composable infrastructure solutions built solidly off our breakthrough ability to deliver multi-fabric support: not only current iterations of PCIe, but also all other common data center fabrics, including Ethernet and Infiniband. Announced alongside our OEM agreement at Dell Technologies World, the advancement again solidifies Liqid’s status as the most comprehensive composable solutions provider in the industry, composing for NVMe, GPU, CPU, NIC, FPGA, and Intel Optane, and extends the value of software-defined composability into data center environments in which PCIe deployments do not suit existing demands. Blocks and Files declared us “fabric happy” over this one, (we couldn’t agree more), and we conducted a video overview of the innovation for Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day.
At SC2019 in Liqid’s hometown of Denver, we announced that we are now able to disaggregate traditional, off-the-shelf converged servers into pools of shareable data center resources. In addition, we demonstrated a collaboration with Western Digital (booth #1275) to demonstrate NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™), leveraging Liqid’s software to manage the OpenFlex open composable platform across low-latency Ethernet fabrics. The demo was very well received, and you can read more about it at SDXCentral.
Another major milestone was achieved and demonstrated at VMWorld: Liqid’s disaggregated composable infrastructure solutions are now optimized to meet the unique demands of VMware vSAN and VDI installations. With on-demand, bare-metal resource orchestration and automation, virtualized environments are freed from the physical limitations of the underlying hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware on which they are deployed. Hypervisors such as vSAN can orchestrate resource allocation via Liqid APIs, extending the life of existing hardware and allowing IT organizations to grow infrastructure as required. eWeek included us in their coverage around the show, so learn more with them.
Excitement around our ability to compose for GPU across software has been one of our key features since the company’s founding. Building on that momentum, at GTC 2019, Liqid showcased its adaptive composable infrastructure platform support for all of the latest NVIDIA GPU solutions, including the NVIDIA T4, NVIDIA V100 Tensor Cores and NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs. Learn more at HPCWire.
Composable Storage
One of our most exciting achievements in composable storage, we debuted the Liqid Element LQD4500 PCIe Add-In-Card (AIC), codenamed “Honey Badger” for its fierce, lightning-fast performance in an ultra-thin full-height, full-length (FHFL) form factor. Based on Liqid’s award-winning composable fabric and software, the offering takes advantage of the newly available Gen 4 PCI-Express (PCIe) specifications to significantly outperform legacy architectures and deliver up to 4-million IOPS of random performance, more than 24 GB/s of throughput, and ultra-low transactional latency of 20 us, with capacities up to 32 TB. Announced at the 2019 Flash Memory Summit, Storage Review has more.
Finally, at Oracle Open World, Liqid introduced a high-memory data center solution with up to 12 TB of Intel® Optane™ memory and 184TB of NVMe storage, enabling in-memory calculations for extremely large datasets. More here!
Composing 2020: What’s Next?
In 2020, look for Liqid to continue the momentum with exciting customer and partner announcements, new use cases for composable infrastructure and composable storage solutions, plenty of new thought leadership in the data center space, and much more from the team here at Liqid.
We couldn’t thank all of our followers enough for the incredible year, and we’re looking forward to making the next year even more epic.
Happy Holidays!
The Liqid Team
