Spinnaker's
current funding should last through the early part of 2004, according to Hornung, though he says it will reconsider whether to pursue additional funding in the middle of the year. Founded in December 1999, the Pittsburgh startup has raised $51.4 million in funding to date from Mellon Ventures Inc.; GIC Special Investments (GIC SI), the private equity investment arm of the government of Singapore; Menlo Ventures; and Norwest Venture Partners (see Spinnaker Sails In With $31M).
The company shipped its first product, SpinServer, in October 2002. Spinnaker says up to 512 of its servers can be clustered together in a single, global file system, providing (it claims) unmatched overall performance and scaleability of up to 11,000 TBytes behind a single file system (see Spinnaker Shoves Off and Spinnaker's Cluster Burns Rubber).
The latest round of layoffs comes as Spinnaker gets ready to ship the 2.0 release of its operating system software, which provides three main features: high availability, meaning any server in a cluster can fail and the others pick up the load; nondisruptive data movement among servers in a cluster; and asynchronous mirroring. Hornung says the beta of 2.0 will be wrapped up within the next two weeks.
Spinnaker isn't ready to talk about any new customers it's landed. But we circled back to one of its earliest beta testers, AccessData Corp., a Pittsburgh-based managed services provider to the financial industry, to see how things were going.
Joe Mayer, director of AccessData's technology center, is running a cluster of SpinServers loaded with a 400-Gbyte Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) database. Now, he's waiting to test out Spinnaker's high-availability feature. "I'm going to fail over the Oracle database, and I want to make sure it actually works," he says.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
