Antonio Neri, President & CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise | @AntonioNeri_HPE AND John Chambers, Chairman of the Board Pensando Systems | @JohnTChambers sit down with Jeff Frick for Welcome to the New Edge by Pensando Systems at Goldman Sachs HQ in NYC. https://siliconangle.com/2019/10/23/launched-with-love-pensando-rallies-investors-early-users-to-take-on-aws-pensandoio/ Pensando’s MPLS gang rallies investors and early users as it takes on AWS Three engineers went out to play, along a network’s web one day. They had such enormous fun that they called for another engineer to come. A merry band of networking engineers — Mario, Prem, Luca and Soni, known as MPLS for short — thought they were ready for retirement around 2017. But the technology world may still need the famous quad of influencers to once again rethink computing architecture. With a likely aim to take on Amazon Inc.’s Annapurna chip, the familiar team of former Cisco Systems Inc. engineers set out to create a better piece of hardware for scaling data at the edge of computing’s network, from server to device. After two years in stealth mode, Pensando Systems Inc. launched with a flurry of high-profile partners and $278 million in total funding. Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, recently spoke with Pensando founders, investors and early users during the Welcome to the New Edge Pensando Systems launch event at the Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC headquarters in NYC. (* Disclosure below.) Truth is out after Pensando’s formal launch Even in stealth mode, Pensando’s two years of early development were hardly under the radar. With a founding team famous for internally supported spin-ins at Cisco, there’s been much speculation about Pensando’s objective. After a formal launch event on the top floor of the Goldman Sachs building last week, the truth is out. Pensando’s data center chip is specifically designed to handle computing tasks related to network management, security and storage. The chip is part of an accelerator card to be plugged into a server to offload these crucial tasks, unburdening the machine’s main processor. The result, according to Pensando, is a 20% to 40% reduction in central processing unit utilization. This power-saving capability is a primary appeal for Pensando’s new card, as it allows for efficiency gains by freeing up computing power that can be better allocated for bigger workloads. And by consolidating a solution for networking, security and storage in a single chip, Pensando hopes to replace the need for sometimes pricey standalone appliances tacked on to servers for managing these tasks. “We saw a number of challenges and opportunities at the same time,” said Soni Jiandani, co-founder and chief business officer of Pensando. “We clearly saw that the cloud architectures that had been built by the leaders and incumbents — like Amazon Web Services — today have a lot of the intelligence being pushed into their respective compute platforms. We also noticed that, while that was what was needed to build the first generation of the cloud, new-age applications … will be processed at the edge by 2025,” she furthered, citing a recent Gartner Inc. study projecting 70% of all enterprise applications will need processing at the edge of computing networks. With the expectation of a market demanding more data intelligence at the edge, Pensando wants to go to where the action is. Consistently, Pensando found that the computing architectures, including scale-out storage, were driving the need for this intelligence at the edge. “You need the services to go hand in hand with that scale-out compute architecture for enterprises so they can simplify their architectures and bring cloud models that have only existed in the cloud world into their own data centers and their own private clouds,” Jiandani explained. Distributed visibility, and beyond To address the many challenges of scale-out architecture for intelligent data transactions at the edge, Pensando at its core is a distributed services platform, according to another founding member. It’s programmable, software-defined nature enables its services to span networking, storage and security, offering extended visibility into the distributed nature of modern cloud architectures. “Visibility is one of the biggest challenges most data centers face today. Lots of people try to do multiple different things, but they’re never able to do it in the way we are doing it,” said Prem Jain (pictured), chief executive officer of Pensando. For starters, Pensando doesn’t run anything on the host server, running everything instead on its specialized chip, avoiding the need to run additional virtual machines on the server.