Hammerspace is working with Cachengo on a service to widen the reach of a data processing, storage and orchestration solution at the edge. Cachengo platforms are now using the distributed Hammerspace Global Data Platform to help organisations connect to their datasets and files.
Cachengo's peer-to-peer encrypted business model, called Rent-a-Node, decentralizes and "democratizes" AI, compute and storage, offering an "economically compelling" alternative to the public cloud, we're told. It does this by allowing retail, office or other physical sites to convert some of their space into edge datacenters, to become infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers to other cloud users.
"This allows content to be distributed very close to the end users," said Cachengo. The provider connects thousands of what it calls "Symbiotes," which are compute and storage nodes on-demand. This "enables massive scalability and enhanced data security" without any egress fees for data "at a fraction of the price" of traditional cloud services, it is promised.
The Cachengo data processing servers - either the small Bento or larger Pizza products - are sold to the edge cloud hosting site and put into racks installed by Cachengo. The hosting site then receives fees from the other organizations using them.
Rent-a-Node operators (RNOs)/hosters have to provide climate controlled environments, reliable power, and fast internet to provide a viable service. "RNOs can realize up to 5X+ rental income profitability compared to traditional compute and GPU architecture rentals from cloud service providers," claimed Cachengo.
By using Knowhere, an "easy-to-use infrastructure management and marketplace", customers can "deploy, manage, and rent" the Symbiote-based Rent-a-Node and software packages they need.
For tenants and software-as-a-service companies, renting Symbiote-based infrastructure nodes to host their software applications can result in a "70 to 90 percent reduction" in hosting costs when compared to traditional cloud service providers, it is claimed.
A full explainer clip on Symbiotes is available to view here. As for the term Symbiote, it could refer to either a fictional alien species in Marvel Comics, a genus of beetles, or a genus of bacteria, or a "symbiont" is an organism living in symbiosis with another. However, a clue is in the aforementioned video clip, as one suggested processing and storage set-up is given the moniker "Venom" - pointing to the Marvel Comics franchise.
"AI workloads are transforming how data is valued, utilized and managed," said David Flynn, CEO of Hammerspace. "Cachengo's Rent-a-Node decentralized cloud solution smartly and uniquely provides data processing at its source with systems that are power efficient, modularly scalable, cost-effective and secure. Additionally, Cachengo's modern business model is ideal for customers who cannot justify using the public cloud."
"Legacy approaches to datacenter expansion are inadequate to satisfy the demand being driven by AI," added Ash Young, CEO of Cachengo. "The market can't wait for power plants to be built to store their data, with Rent-a-Node we provide an eco-friendly immediate solution to add capacity exactly where it's needed."