About

Sunlight.io is a startup that brings new cloud platform solutions to the market redefining high performance in cloud and virtualisation. Sunlight.io is bringing new products to the market that help to redefine what high performance cloud and virtualisation is really about, transforming the market with a suite of products implemented for on-premise enterprise infrastructure, in the cloud via AWS baremetal services and at the edge for remote resource constrained environments.

Solution & Product

The Sunlight.io Enterprise Software Platform is a hyper-converged IaaS system optimized to provide the highest I/O and networking performance for virtualized workloads, using Virtual Machines or containers. It is built on top of the “NexVisor”, a next-generation hypervisor stack, designed and optimized to support today’s high performance hardware technologies with almost zero overhead, delivering a whole new paradigm in virtual IO performance. The Sunlight.io Enterprise Software Platform is a hyper-converged infrastructure system based on Sunlight.io’s new Hypervisor technology purpose-built for the cognitive workload era, offering increased performance and minimized costs for virtualized workloads either on premise or in cloud. Sunlight.io provides a complete hyperconverged stack – including hypervisor, software defined storage and software defined networking components – all designed for providing the maximum possible speed.

Innovation & Scalability

1) Unified virtualization layer for both datacenter (Cloud) and Edge nodes, implemented as an advanced virtualization platform. Edge virtualization refers to virtualizing compute, memory, storage, and networking resources of the edge nodes, in order to allow applications to run on the edge infrastructure without being aware of the actual hardware and also to manage resource efficiently through software-defined abstractions for storage and networking. 2) Resource management within the local Cloud infrastructure and realization of a distributed resource management approach including the Edge-side resources, embracing all sites participating in the distributed architecture. Enable cross-testbed site resource scheduling that will: a) maintain distributed monitoring information on the resource status and policy mode of each testbed site accessible to participating entities, b) act in an autonomous, distributed manner that will utilize the available cross-site monitoring and prediction information to enforce the specified scheduling policies and ensure availability and stable operation (e.g. avoid faulty servers or networks). Sunlight.io has entered a competitive market, currently dominated by large companies, such as AWS, VMware, Microsoft (Azure) and several other companies. However, given its synergies with the same companies, they are also its collaborators.

Traction & achievements

January 2019 - Initial creation of the Sunlight technology prototype – achieved 1 Million IOPs fully virtualized January 2020 - First major GA release to market for production customers January 2020 - First major edge customer deployment using Sunlight technology (Lavazza) April 2020 - Reached 30 employees August 2020 - Incorporation of the Greek Sunlight company to support growth and investment into the engineering team in Greece October 2020 - First major datacenter build commitment using Sunlight technology (Eschercloud) November 2020 - New investors joined the board (Bosch and OpenOcean) March 2021 - Reached 40 employees

Team & Why Us

Julian Chesterfield, founder and CEO, was one of the team that built the first Open Source hypervisor, Xen in 2003. The edge market is growing fast with very few compelling commercial solutions available today. The incumbent HCI products from VMWare and Nutanix were never designed to be able to operate on constrained hardware and extreme edge operating environments. Sunlight therefore has a significant advantage with a solution that is 1/5 of the footprint and 10x the performance of the alternatives. Cloud is another important growth area. Barriers to growth potential would be development lag, partner adoption, and circumstances such as covid. Sunlight.io is offering new technologies to different markets and is growing its customer base by reaching more diversified customers, in international and European markets. Sunlight.io platform developments are aiming at building new/enhanced services geared to support multiple, heterogeneous clouds. Sunlight.io also plans to analyze the emerging requirements from the Big-data and 5G domains through the implementation of market-specific use-cases, in order to enrich its current solutions to meet users’ needs and also address potential customers’ issues related to lower operational expenditure (OPEX), lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and better energy efficiency.

Funding Needs

Sunlight primarily sells through partners who install our solution onto their hardware. Sunlight's plan for the next two years is to continue on improvement on Sunlight solution and build a name in the edge market.