Nvidia announced Friday that it has acquired SwiftStack, a software-focused data storage and management infrastructure that supports Cloud technology and edge system deployments.
Joe Arnold, SwiftStack co-founder and president, disclosed the procurement in a blog and said SwiftStack has collaborated with Nvidia for more than one year to solve data challenges that enable Artificial Intelligence at scale.
The company's recent launches put strong premium on enhancing its support for AI, ultra-speed computing and fast-tracking computational workloads, which is definitely what Nvidia has been most interested about.
According to Arnold, "creating Artificial Intelligence super-machines is thrilling for everyone at SwiftStack," stressing that the team couldn't be happier to work with the talented people at Nvidia and look forward to contributing to its world-leading computing solutions.
Nvidia and SwiftStack did not made public the price of the deal, but SwiftStack had previously generated around $23.6 million in Series-A and Series-B funding spearheaded by OpenView Ventures and Mayfield Fund. Other financiers include UMC Capital and Storm Ventures.
Nvidia director of enterprise computing Manuvir Das said that the company does not want to become "a storage facility" or to sell storage. Nvidia uses SwiftStack technology in all its major data hubs. "We're not going to sell it," Das pointed out, but the company will make it available to its clients.
SwiftStack, which was established in 2011, put an early wager on OpenStack, the large open-source program whose objective is to provide businesses an AWS-like management system in their own data facilities.
The company was among the biggest contributors to OpenStack's Swift data storage infrastructure and offered a host of services around the platform, although it seems like in the past few years the company has downplayed the OpenStack cooperation as that platform's reputation has waned in many aspects.
Signs of strain at SwiftStack slowly came out middle of December 2019 when it let go an undisclosed number of workers. The company also announced a falling away from commodity data storage to high-performance and super-fast scale applications - which is the focus of SwiftStack 7.
SwiftStack lists the likes of payment service companies PayPal, Rogers, data center firm DC Blox, Verizon and Snapfish on its client page. Nvidia, too, is a client. SwiftStack said that its team will continue to maintain an existing program of open-source apps like Swift, ProxyFS, 1space and Controller.
SwiftStack said it will continue to maintain and support the 1space, ProxyFS, Swift, and Controller technologies in its software suite. The buyout should be finalized in the next few weeks, subject to certain terms and conditions.
