Liqid is a data center innovation company that develops disruptive solutions for the bare-metal cloud, enabling hyperscale agility to the masses. It delivers unprecedented infrastructure agility, marking the next evolution in data center technology. As a global leader in Composable Infrastructure (CI), Liqid’s open platform allows users, either manually or through policy-based automation, to effortlessly manage and configure “physical” bare metal server systems in seconds. Liqid’s software and hardware work in harmony allows users to configure their physical server infrastructure on-the-fly while enabling true datacenter disaggregation.
The Liqid CI Platform is the only solution on the market today that finally delivers IT users the ability to compose physical bare metal systems on demand. Liqid does this by freeing IT users from the static motherboard-chassis paradigm that has governed the datacenter for decades. At its foundation, Liqid CI software resides on Liqid Grid, a PCIe-based fabric component developed to transform traditional datacenter architecture. The design takes advantage of the common PCIe interface shared by the compute root complex and peripheral devices such as storage and networking. This simple design allows users to pool and deploy these resources natively across PCIe via Liqid CI, subverting the physical limitations of the motherboard architecture and delivering unprecedented agility at the physical bare metal level.
By making the topography dynamic, Liqid delivers composability and connectivity out of the box and into the datacenter. With the Liqid CI Platform, users can scale various resources independently without having to predict business cycles that are several quarters, if not years, away. Now companies can better realize true disaggregation, building out their hardware infrastructure as needed without being locked into a predefined infrastructure at the point of purchase.
The Visionary Pioneer behind Innovative Technology
Jay Breakstone, Founder and CEO is the visionary behind Liqid’s innovative technology. A pioneer in CI, Jay understood that infrastructure was open to new innovations once storage, compute and networking spoke the same language – PCI Express. He recognized that by sharing the same protocol these individual elements of the data center could be pooled and managed at the foundational level, enabling users to orchestrate infrastructure and define their servers on demand and on physical bare metal. From there, Liqid was founded with one simple goal: “engineer the IT platform of the future.”
A Fast-Paced Technology Startup Culture making the Buzz
Liqid’s culture is that of a fast-paced technology startup, where high-energy, motivated professionals are looking to work on something truly transformational; these types of people tend to be naturally drawn to the company. Liqid’s culture fosters creativity and innovation, and the employees instinctively aspire to do great things. At every level of the company, Liqid team members participate in the excitement and buzz around the technology they have helped develop, which keeps its people inspired, fulfilled and promotes professional growth.
Exemplary Annotations from Clients Inspiring the Team
Inspur Systems is a customer and OEM partner of Liqid’s technology. Dolly Wu, General Manager of Data Center and Cloud USA at Inspur, believes composable infrastructure “represents the next evolution of software-defined, rack-level solutions that are introducing previously unrealized business agility” to the enterprise datacenter, and she has strongly endorsed the Liqid approach.
“Liqid’s CI Platform accelerates the shift to the next generation datacenter, as it delivers on the promise of flexibility made by composable infrastructure. Liqid’s CI technology is empowering IT administrators with seamless creativity toward building the perfect infrastructure to meet the constantly changing demands of modern businesses,” Wu said.
Enabling the Highest Degree of Infrastructure Flexibility
Liqid was founded with the vision to change the foundation of IT infrastructure and the way IT platforms are deployed, managed and consumed. Typical equipment utilization ranges from 12% on average to 30% at the very best. Liqid CI enables the industry’s highest degree of infrastructure flexibility and can improve those metrics 3-5x by injecting unprecedented agility into today’s static infrastructure.
Gartner and other industry thought leaders have documented that CI represents the logical evolution of the datacenter from hyper converged infrastructure and integrated systems. Ben Woo, principal analyst for Neuralytix, recently noted: “The companies that build a fabric-based CI solutions utilizing disaggregated bare metal resources will quickly become leaders in this emerging space, delivering the most flexible next-generation methods for agile data engagement.”
Creating a New Medium while Developing Greater Efficiencies
The unprecedented flexibility of the Liqid CI Platform delivers significant reductions in operational spending and a new level of resource adaptability that powerfully increases overall infrastructure utilization. By rethinking how infrastructure is built from the ground up, Liqid is creating a new medium to allow its customers and partners to develop even greater efficiencies and further innovation across datacenter applications and cloud deployments.
Liqid is working hard to continue to create excitement around the Liqid CI Platform and what benefits it can deliver for IT users. The company will maintain a strong and active presence at industry conferences and other events throughout the course of 2017 in order to educate the marketplace about the value of composable infrastructure. Moving forward, Liqid will continue to work closely with beta customers, OEM partners and other parties to refine and perfect the product for general availability. Liqid expects to announce GA of the Liqid CI Platform in the second half of 2017.
Their goal is to continue developing and executing on the Liqid product roadmap and to provide customers with leading-edge, differentiated solutions that deliver efficiency and flexibility to the data center and its users.
