Linux Cluster Specialist Terascala Gets $3 Million in Venture Funding

Published: March 20, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Linux cluster specialist Terascala, a niche player in the Linux cluster market that is developing a blade architecture that combines server and storage blades, has secured its first round of funding from venture capitalists.

Terascala, which is based in Avon, Massachusetts, has secured $3 million in funding from Ascent Venture Partners, and plans to use the funds to help it sell its blade clusters for high performance computing. Like other server makers, Terascala is trying to get as many processor cores and disk drives in a server chassis as possible while reducing the amount of power and cooling such machines require.

Terascala was founded in 2005 by Larry Genovesi, its president and chief information officer, and Bill Elliott, its chief operating officer. Both hail from Network Engines, the originator of the 1U rack-mount server that put IBM into the game and gave it something to sell against Compaq in the dot-com boom years. Network Engines went public in 2000, raising $117 million, and was quickly pushed to the IT sidelines and vendors did their own 1U server designs and the server market went into a slide in 2001. Genovesi hails from the former Digital Equipment (how part of HP) and Elliott had stints in the server units of IBM and Stratus.

The company is, of course, promoting the use of Linux on clusters, and has created infrastructure called QuickConnect to allow server and storage blades to be quickly linked together so applications in the HPC cluster can use them. The Blade Cluster chassis of the Terascala enclosure has all cables--power, network, and storage--in the rear of the chassis, and server and storage blades can be snapped in and out at will without having to worry about cabling to mezzanine cards. The company has said very little about its iron to date, expect that they are based on dual-core, low-powered Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. It seems likely that Terascala is waiting for the quad-core "Barcelona" chips, due maybe in June or July of this year, to start making a lot of noise in the market. Using the current dual-core Opterons, Terascala can pack 400 cores in a standard 42U rack. The company's storage blades have eight hot-swap SAS disks, with 500 GB or 750 GB of capacity. Terascala says that it can support up to 150 TB of disk in a single chassis, and over 7.5 PB across a single cluster. The server and storage blades can be mixed and matched inside the Terascala chassis, too, and the whole shebang includes failover, system management and monitoring.

Market researcher IDC is projecting that HPC server sales will grow from $9.2 billion in 2005 to $14 billion in 2010. And there is little question that the vendors who provide low cost per flops, very high efficiency in terms of electricity, and scalability will be well positioned to sell not just into the corporate, academic, and government supercomputing centers, but into businesses that are using Linux clusters to support sophisticated commercial applications for the Web and business intelligence.

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