“All companies are B2C or B2Scale companies, driven by technology. Their technology infrastructure needs are therefore specific and different than in the past. They need systems that scale-up and scale-out fast and cheap,” said Ram Appalaraju, President and CEO, 8kpc. This statement characterizes the opportunity for disruptive innovation that was spotted and exploited by 8kpc.
Based in Milpitas, CA., with engineering operations at Bangalore, 8kpc is a disruptive technology company that is squarely positioned to provide a type of modern of IT infrastructure appliance called hyperconverged systems. 8kpc’s multi-layered innovation approach has paved a new way for application scaling and large-volume data computing, the company says.
Delivering Performance-centric Hyperconvergence
Ram describes the company and its offerings thus: “8kpc is a startup company focused on disrupting IT infrastructures in the areas of scalability for IT workloads at a dramatically low price point. 8kpc’s products are flash-based hyper-converged appliances that pack a lot of performance for applications.”
8kpc appliances are serving as building blocks for data centers in BFSI, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail in India, Ram revealed.
The 8kpc product is a single appliance designed to replace multiple servers, storage, and networking systems. The data protection and storage functions are included for free, which is ideal for verticals such as healthcare, which manage large amounts of critical patient data to meet regulatory needs. For example, the HCA 2000, one of 8kpc’s hyperconverged systems, is optimized to deliver over 400,000 sustainable IOPS and is well suited for real-time analytics workloads across all major verticals.
Hyperconverged systems are not a category invented by 8kpc. But 8kpc’s technology is disruptive purely from the point of view of the economics and ease of use. “8kpc’s disruptions have successfully enabled businesses to save over 75% in CapEx and at least 60% in OpEx. With innovation at its core, 8kpc has produced simple, affordable yet powerful solutions in the hyperconvergence space,” claims Ram. “8kpc has 3x the price performance advantage with lesser number of nodes, having less hardware footprint, thus enabling solutions that allow customers to start small and scale as needed,” he added.
Exploiting Market Opportunity
8kpc has been included in the 2017 Gartner Cool Vendors for Compute Platforms report. The company has been selected as a ‘Cool Vendor’ by Gartner for being innovative, impactful, and intriguing. Highlighting the importance of Cool Vendors, Gartner report states, “I&O leaders yet to invest in hyperconvergence will find strong innovation from new vendors that are focusing on solving the bottlenecks and scaling limitations that many users experience today.”
The converged infrastructure category has been evolving to bring much-needed agility to IT and is seeing global adoption among enterprises at an accelerated rate. According to Gartner, India will be the second largest market and also the second fastest growing market for data center infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region. Current data center infrastructure solutions are complex and expensive and the market is looking for solutions that deliver high capability at an affordable rate.
Focused on the Needs of the Indian Market
8kpc counts dozens of companies including a leading stock exchange, telcos, and private sector enterprises such as Bajaj Electricals as its customers in India. In May last year, 8kpc launched a product specifically for the Indian market. The company launched a comprehensive, high performance and high-density proof point for VDI, the HCA 1000, a platform that is optimized to deliver exceptional performance and scalability for enterprises at a cost lower than other alternative solutions.
Says Ram, “Enterprises with this innovation and economics can confidently design and deploy VDI solutions – under price of a typical PC, while enjoying the benefits of centralized computing.” He emphasized that with the launch of the HCA 1000 and the HCA 2000, 8kpc has provided solutions for data centers for consolidating virtualized workloads, VDI and high-performance data scaling that’s appropriate for mid-markets and enterprises.
