INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Cloud computing has been a revolution for the data center
Rather than investing in expensive hardware and managing a data center directly, companies are relying on public cloud providers like AWS,
Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure to provide general-purpose and high-availability compute, storage, and networking resources in a highly
flexible way.Yet as workflows have moved to the cloud, companies are increasingly realizing that those abstracted resources can be
enormously expensive compared to the hardware they used to own
Few companies want to go back to managing hardware directly themselves, but they also yearn to have the price-to-performance level they used
that hardware.Even more interesting is that Packet will also deploy custom hardware to its data centers, which currently number eighteen
So, for instance, if you want to deploy a quantum computing box redundantly in half of those centers, Packet will handle the logistics of
installing those boxes, setting them up, and managing that infrastructure for you.The company was founded in 2014 by Zac Smith, Jacob Smith,
and Aaron Welch, and it has raised a total of $12 million in venture capital financing according to Crunchbase, with its last round led by
Double bass was a first love, but he found his way eventually into internet hosting, working as COO of New York-based Voxel.At Voxel, Smith
said that he grew up in hosting just as the cloud started taking off
abstracting away any details of the underlying infrastructure from developers
The idea of Packet was to bring back choice in infrastructure to these developers, while abstracting away the actual data center logistics
that none of them wanted to work on
In short, the company wants to completely change the model of hardware development worldwide.VCs are increasingly investing in specialized
chips and memory to handle unique processing loads, from machine learning to quantum computing applications
In some cases, these chips can process their workloads exponentially faster compared to general purpose chips, which at scale can save
equipment manufacturers with end-user developers
What he means is that Packet allows you to rent space in its global network of data centers and handle all the logistics of installing and
monitoring hardware boxes, much as WeWork allows companies to rent real estate while it handles the minutia like resetting the coffee
filter.In this vision, Packet would create more discerning and diverse buyers, allowing manufacturers to start targeting more specialized
Gone are the generic x86 processors from Intel driving nearly all cloud purchases, and in their place could be dozens of new hardware
vendors who can build up their brands among developers and own segments of the compute and storage workload.In this way, developers can hack
their infrastructure much as an earlier generation may have tricked out their personal computer
They can now test new hardware more easily, and when they find a particular piece of hardware they like, they can get it running in the
Realizing it will require that hardware manufacturers increasingly build differentiated chips
More importantly, companies will have to have unique workflows, be at a scale where optimizing those workflows is imperative, and realize
dream is to create exactly that kind of marketplace
If successful, it could transform how hardware and cloud vendors work together and ultimately, the innovation of any 32-year-old millennial
