Gridcentric

 

Company profile

Gridcentric, Inc., is a virtualization software company and pioneer of Virtual Memory Streaming (VMS), a game-changing virtualization technology. We maintain corporate offices in Toronto, Canada, and Santa Clara, California. Founded in 2009, we are venture-backed by Citrix Systems, Rogers Ventures, the Investment Accelerator Fund of Ontario, and the Ontario Centres of Excellence.

Our technology derives from SnowFlock, an award-winning research project conducted at the University of Toronto’s Department of Computer Science by Andres Lagar-Cavilla and Adin Scannell. SnowFlock applied the idea of an operating system fork — a process of self-replication — to cluster management, a widely recognized problem that was proving intractable in the department’s computational biology lab.

When fellow graduate student Tim Smith — who at that time was working independently on networking, storage, and real-time systems — witnessed an early demonstration of SnowFlock, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Neither could prospective investors. Within a few short weeks, Gridcentric was formed with Smith, Lagar-Cavilla, and Scannell named as President, Chief Scientific Officer, and Chief Technology Officer, respectively. Meanwhile, technology leader and 20-year industry veteran Eric Shefler, who initially served as advisor to the fledgling company, would later assume the role of CEO upon seeing the enormous market opportunity that lay ahead for Gridcentric.

Since those early days, our team has grown, allowing us to refine and advance our technology still further. VMS can now deliver astonishing performance, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency gains wherever virtualized infrastructure is found — whether in general-purpose cloud computing deployments such as OpenStack or application-specific use cases such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

Before the advancement of VMS, the process of instantiating a virtual server (that is, bringing it to a point of readiness to do useful work, with applications locked and loaded in memory) had been plagued by the limitations of a legacy boot process and the underlying hardware on which it depends. This has made virtualized infrastructure hardware intensive, slow to boot, formidable to manage, and difficult to scale.

VMS not only shatters the physical limits of virtualization performance, it radically changes the economics of virtualization-based solutions. Gridcentric makes this technology available through easy-to-install and fully supported software extensions, ready for integration with leading hypervisors such as KVM and XenServer.

If you or your customers run virtualized infrastructure, it’s time we got better acquainted. Contact us today to begin the conversation.