Hive computing firm Tsunami Research has closed on a $2.3 million Series A funding round.
Existing investors Southeastern Technology Fund were joined in the oversubscribed round by a group of angel investors, including Kevin Haar, former SVP of field operations at Rational Software.
Tsunami plans to use the money to expand product and business development and marketing initiatives.
The funding comes almost a year after the company first launched its HiveCreator computing solution. With HiveCreator, the company says users can enable large numbers of dedicated commodity computers to collectively form a new type of mission critical computing environment called a hive. Self-organizing, self-healing and self-maintaining characteristics let customers host their transactional and service-oriented applications more reliably and affordably.
"Tsunami Research's products bring the power of commodity-based Grids to address transaction-based applications through their hive computing technology," says analyst Ahmar Abbas of Grid Technology Partners. "A hive becomes another resource on the Grid, as would a cluster, SMP machine or desktop. It's a great complement to Grid computing."
Unlike Grid computing, which focuses primarily on computational problems, Tsunami's approach focuses on transactional applications that make up the core of business process, says company spokesman Sam Charrington.
Charrington cites credit card processors as an example. "During the non-peak season, a major credit card processor we're talking to handles about 2,500 credit card transactions per second," Charrington says. "They currently do this using a heavyweight fault-tolerant computing system in several data centers in a number of geographic regions. We propose that a transaction processing system like this should be built using a hive, which is a software-based fabric running on commodity hardware."
A hive has a number of autonomous characteristics, Charrington says, so in addition to dramatically reducing the cost of the infrastructure itself, the costs of maintaining and running it are slashed too. "The cost reductions we are talking about here are order of magnitude or more," he says.
For a credit card processor, peak-season load is almost double non-peak load. "To meet peak demand, we envision the card processor increasing the transaction processing ability of their hive by purchasing additional capacity from a vendor, possibly via a Grid," Charrington says.
Charrington says Tsunami Research is "currently working with a handful of organizations who are evaluating or building upon the technology."
Grid Forum 10 Deadline Approaches
Advance registration will close Jan. 30 for Global Grid Forum 10, to be held March 9-13 in Berlin, Germany.
The conference will include a number of workshops in Grid systems, applications and data environments.
For more information, visit GGF.org.
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