Tech Innovators 2015: Sardinia Systems

Sardinia Systems are one of our top 20 tech innovators for 2015

Presenter: Dr Kenneth Tan

Job title: CEO

Based in: London

Founded in: 2014

No. of Employees: 6

Dr Kenneth Tan

Dr Kenneth Tan has 18+ years industry experience in selling products and services to major data center operators (automotive, energy, defence, meteo, finance), and in IP-rich transactions involving Tier-1 system vendors. He built OptimaNumerics to 8-figure valuation by SGI. He has led teams in UK, Germany, FSU.

Recent Milestones

  • Commercially validated FishDirector, ground breaking software for automating energy optimization and utilization improvement for 
  • OpenStack data centers
  • Chosen for managing 150,000 VMs at a large scale R&D facility
  • Established distributorships in Japan, Europe, and N America
  • Value of FishDirector acknowledged by SUSE, IBM, Red Hat

Upcoming Milestones

  • Sales expansion, foothold in finance, bioinformatics and aerospace; target 100k VMs in next 6 months
  • System vendor co-marketing (HP, IBM, Red Hat, SuSE, Oracle, Cisco)
  • Build-up of commercial and technical teams: establish sales team in N America, EMEA, Russia, expand existing development team
  • Address additional virtualization areas: network function virtualization, storage virtualization, while focusing on operations optimization and automation

Background profile

Sardina Systems was founded in 2014 to develop cloud data center infrastructure management and automation software.

The product was developed based on the founders’ operations challenges and experience on large scale systems in investment banking, numerous supercomputing systems, including top 3 global weather forecasting system and world’s largest supercomputers.

Inside track

The team at Sardina Systems identified that with the growth of the cloud data centre market and in cloud data centre sizes, there is a need for an automation solution capable of increasing server utilization and optimizing data centre energy consumption, while scaling up to large facilities. 

Unlike the situation in smaller environments of yesteryears, data centre automation in cloud data centres today involves complex high dimensional optimization computations that do not fit into traditional process-handling solutions.

Sardina Systems is the first to bring an energy-optimizing and utilization-
improving solution to OpenStack data centres. They have developed a unique technology for optimizing cloud data centre utilization and energy consumption, scaling from smaller facilities with tens of servers to larger ones with tens of thousands of servers (100k and beyond).

Founder Kenneth Tan explains that the business “is now talking to a number of private investors – and has also been approached by several venture funds”.

“We’ve seen FishDirector being successfully deployed in environments for managing from tens of thousands of VMs to over a hundred thousand VMs, and are now gaining attention from major international system vendors,” he explains.

“There must be something right in what we are doing, so generally, we intend to hold our course.

Recent Technology

  • FishDirector’s State Data Collectors gather and consolidate in a Data Warehouse component, detailed resource utilization metrics. These metrics then enable FishDirector’s advanced Decision Engines to solve NP-hard problems.
  • Mathematically, these problems are akin to complex high dimensional jigsaw puzzle problems. The Decision Engines subsequently interface with OpenStack.

Products

  • FishDirector: World’s first energy optimization and utilization improvement solution for OpenStack

Alliances

  • OpenStack Foundation
  • Tier-1 system vendors: HP, IBM, Cisco, Oracle
  • OS Vendors: Red Hat, SUSE
  • Large scale data center service providers: Erlang Solutions
  • System integration distributors: Rickey & Co
  • Shared defensive IP pool: Open Innovation Network (OIN)

Investors

  • Founder financed

Contact details

Postal address: Further details on our locations can be found on 

sardinasystems.com

Tel: +44 203 468 9857

Email: info@sardinasystems.com

kenneth.tan@sardinasystems.com

Website: www.sardinasystems.com

Praseeda Nair

Praseeda Nair

Praseeda was Editor for GrowthBusiness.co.uk from 2016 to 2018.

Related Topics

Cloud Technology