The AI boom has encouraged everyone and their uncle to launch a data center business. But spinning up a data center isn’t easy.
Even if you solve the problem of securing the GPUs, network switches, and storage, you still have to get everything configured, running, and be able to cater to customers’ various needs. Getting a data center ready to provide cloud-computing services specifically for AI inference and training services can take months of work. And the longer you take to get to market, the higher the cost of having all those precious GPUs sitting idle.
Network automation startup Netris claims it can make that problem disappear for neoclouds. The company provides software that runs on network switches, and it also offers a platform that connects to switches to help neocloud operators reduce the time it takes to go live by automating setup, configuration, and operations. The platform also provides network abstraction, so hardware configurations can be changed as required, and it isolates servers and resources at the hardware layer so neoclouds can serve multiple customers (multi-tenancy).
If that sounds like a solution to an obvious problem, you’re not wrong. Until recently, data centers were largely the domain of large infrastructure operators like Equinix, NTT, Digital Realty, Oracle, Microsoft, AWS, or Google. Those companies pretty much solved network setup, configuration, and multi-tenancy for themselves by hiring ranks of engineers or building the automation themselves. Small neocloud businesses rarely have such resources at their disposal.
“As a GPU cluster operator, you need to make configuration changes to every link, every day. At traditional data centers, they were using something called SDN [software-defined networking] to do this, but SDN is falling short, because it’s a software technology,” Netris’ CEO Alex Saroyan told TechCrunch. “For AI, software is not okay, because the amount of traffic is so high, everything must be hardware accelerated. So you need something like SDN, but completely hardware accelerated. This is what we do, and this is what we’ve been doing for eight years.”
Saroyan said Netris’ platform is vendor-agnostic, compatible with networking equipment and standards used at data centers, both for Nvidia and AMD’s servers.
The startup’s promise has found many believers, one of which is Nvidia. Two years ago, the chipmaking giant was so impressed by a demo of Netris’ technology that it recommended the company to several customers. Today, Netris is live at more than 35 GPU clusters around the world (about a million GPUs total), operated by the likes of Lightning AI, Foxconn, Visionbay, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, TensorWave, Telus, and others.
To build on that momentum, Netris has now raised $15 million in a Series A round from Andreessen Horowitz, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Notably, there’s no AI at work here. Saroyan said the company only uses algorithms it had developed previously for running and configuring automation and operations.
“We started way before AI. We understood the challenge early on, and we started developing this algorithm early on. AI is not deterministic, right? Sometimes it likes to do things on its own. It’s good for creative work, but for changing many thousands of switch configurations, you don’t need to be creative. You need to be very persistent and repeatable.”
a16z partner Guido Appenzeller is joining the company’s board. Looking forward, Netris aims to use the funding to hire more engineers and sales staff, add support for more hardware vendors, and implement more functionality in its algorithm.
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