OpenDrives Partners with Kazuhm to Power High-Performance, Low-Cost Storage and Compute

March 24, 2021 — OpenDrives, the global provider of enterprise-grade, hyper-scalable network-attached-storage (NAS) solutions, announced today that it has partnered with Kazuhm, the distributed computing technology leader that enables IoT and other enterprise data to be processed with ultra-low latency and cost. Joining the OpenDrives containerization marketplace, also announced today as a new feature to OpenDrives’ centralized management software platform (Atlas), Kazuhm allows end-users to activate and integrate compute nodes on their network regardless of operating system or type of device.

“At OpenDrives, we’ve taken a storage-first approach to compute by bringing containerized applications and automation directly into the storage infrastructure. The introduction of ‘pods’ and ‘recipes’ simplifies deployment and management of these containerized applications, thus reducing complexity and increasing performance,” said Sean Lee, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at OpenDrives. “By partnering with best-in-class distributed compute technology leaders like Kazuhm, who share our same values in ensuring ultra-low latency and cost, enterprise-scale organizations can run multiple workloads in isolated virtual environments as close as possible to the data to optimize performance.”

Kazuhm runs secondary workloads that never interfere with the node’s primary function to enable secure, low-cost, low-latency compute across a variety of enterprise applications. Designed to run on the OpenDrives storage device, Kazuhm enables OpenDrives’ complete storage hardware and compute offering to leverage any customer IT asset, providing a flexible storage-compute offering versus rigid on-premise private cloud solutions that require dedicated hardware assets.

“We are extremely pleased to have the opportunity to be the first OpenDrives partner to deliver our distributed computing capabilities as an integrated feature of the Atlas platform,” said Andreas Roell, CEO of Kazuhm. “OpenDrives’ containerization marketplace enables us to expand our reach to a new set of customers that have not yet experienced the cost and performance benefits of running containerized workloads on their own on-premise devices.”

Kazuhm is available through the OpenDrives containerization marketplace, a rapidly growing ecosystem that, through a robust API, allows customers to load recipes on the compute module without interfering with storage performance and further power OpenDrives’ scale-up, scale-out infrastructure. OpenDrives’ software dashboard, also included in the latest Atlas software release, unlocks deep insights into all analytics running on the OpenDrives system, in real-time, with an easy-to-use graphical interface.

Additional applications in the OpenDrives containerization marketplace include: DaVinci Resolve Project Server, as well as common agents for services like Grafana Analytics and Splunk.

To learn more about OpenDrives’ latest solutions or to see how you can join the OpenDrives containerization marketplace, email [email protected] or visit www.opendrives.com. To learn more about Kazuhm, visit www.kazuhm.com.

About OpenDrives

OpenDrives is a global provider of enterprise-grade, hyper-scalable network-attached-storage (NAS) solutions. Founded in 2011 by media and entertainment post-production professionals, OpenDrives is built for the most demanding workflows, from Hollywood to healthcare, and businesses large and small. OpenDrives delivers the highest performing solutions to match individual performance needs, even for the most robust, complex and mission-critical projects, on-premises and into the cloud. OpenDrives is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. To learn more about OpenDrives, visit www.opendrives.com.

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Kazuhm Welcomes Distributed Computing Pioneer Dr. Larry Smarr as Technology Evangelist

UCSD Distinguished Professor Emeritus Brings Decades of Experience and Technical Expertise

August 19, 2020—Kazuhm, a leader in technology and tools for maximizing IT efficiency, today announced that Dr. Larry Smarr will provide support to the Kazuhm leadership team as Technology Evangelist. With over 40 years of experience driving information technology innovation in academia, government agencies, and private industry, Dr. Smarr brings a practical vision for the ever-broadening use of distributed computing.

“We are thrilled to have Dr. Smarr with his unmatched knowledge and experience contributing to the Kazuhm team’s foundational expertise and outreach,” said Andreas Roell, Kazuhm CEO. “Containerization, when applied to distributed computing, represents a paradigm shift in the way organizations process their workloads and store data, and there is no one better for Kazuhm to partner with than Dr. Smarr to deliver this message to the IT community.”

Dr. Smarr is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. From 2000-2020, he served as the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, and held the Harry E. Gruber professorship in UCSD’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Before that (1985-2000) he was the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. He received his Physics Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of Texas at Austin and did postdoctoral research at Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, before becoming a Professor of Physics and of Astronomy at UIUC in 1979.

Additionally, Dr. Smarr has supported government agencies at the state and federal levels including 8 years as a member of the NIH Advisory Committee to the NIH Director, serving three directors. Dr. Smarr served on the NASA Advisory Council to four NASA Administrators, was chair of the NASA Information Technology Infrastructure Committee, and the NSF Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure. He also served on Governor Schwarzenegger’s California Broadband Taskforce in 2007. He currently serves on the Advisory Board to the Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He continues to provide national leadership in advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI), currently serving as Principal Investigator on three NSF CI research grants: Pacific Research Platform, Cognitive Hardware, and Software Ecosystem Community Infrastructure, and Toward a National Research Platform.

Among numerous honors and awards, Dr. Smarr is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for his lifetime achievements in distributed computing systems in 2006 and in 2014 the Golden Goose Award.

“Capital investments in on-premise computers are often underutilized in many organizations because of the lack of a secure and flexible software infrastructure that can make full use of the capability of today’s distributed systems,” said Dr. Smarr. “I am looking forward to partnering with Kazuhm to help the IT community across sectors more fully utilize the hardware assets they have paid for, as well as to extend to external cloud resources, to meet the growing demand for compute capacity.”

Dr. Smarr gives frequent keynote addresses at professional conferences and to popular audiences. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Atlantic, New Yorker, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Fortune, Business Week, CBS, and the BBC.

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Kazuhm Launches Industry’s First SaaS-Enabled Distributed Computing Platform

New feature provides IT departments with self-service installation for over 100,000 applications

April 29, 2020—Kazuhm today announced the launch of its “bring-your-own-app” functionality allowing users to independently run any application with a Docker Compose file within the Kazuhm distributed computing environment. This new feature enables Kazuhm users to choose from more than 100,000 containerized applications in the Docker Hub library and quickly and easily deploy those apps across their Kazuhm-enabled corporate assets including servers, desktops, laptops, and multi-cloud resources.

Kazuhm is the only distributed computing platform available as an enterprise-grade product allowing organizations to take full advantage of the computing power they already own across all their devices. With the latest Kazuhm release, customers can upload and edit Docker Compose files, then configure and deploy applications with just a few clicks. This eliminates the need for extensive command-line capabilities and facilitates the use of many popular applications within the Kazuhm platform. Among the 100,000+ applications available as Docker Compose files are MySQL, WordPress, Elastic Stack (ELK), Redis, Cassandra, and many more.

“Since our inception, our vision has been to provide corporations with the industry’s first SaaS-enabled distributed compute platform. With the launch of our bring-your-own-app functionality, we have now reached this significant milestone,” says Gregg Holsapple, vice president of product at Kazuhm. “Kazuhm allows corporations of any size to build a powerful compute fabric using resources they already own, lowering IT costs, and improving application performance. And the beauty behind it is that our drag-and-drop approach does not require any command-line capabilities, making it quick to establish and easy to maintain while saving hours of IT staff time.”

Also available in the current release are expanded scheduling and control features, deeper insights into host CPU and memory usage by deployed applications, and more visibility and automation for Docker installation on Windows and Linux devices.

Kazuhm COVID-19 Response

In related news, Kazuhm announced on March 23 their AI-driven distributed computing solution will be provided free to any organization fighting the coronavirus pandemic. University and private sector research labs, test kit manufacturers, companies providing free or reduced-cost video conferencing solutions, and companies who have quickly ramped up manufacturing for items such as hand sanitizer, gloves, and face masks can all take advantage of Kazuhm to increase their computing capacity. This offer is available to any organization across the globe that meets the criteria of contributing to the fight against COVID-19. Visit https://www.kazuhm.com/covid-19-response/ for more information on this offer.

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Kazuhm Expands AI-Driven User Insights and Controls with Latest Distributed Computing Solution

Enterprise-grade distributed computing solution enables IT cost savings and intelligent compute resource management

SAN DIEGO, Ca.—April 3, 2020—Kazuhm today announced the availability of advanced AI-driven insights and controls in the latest release of their distributing computing platform. Newly added functionality uses artificial intelligence algorithms to forecast available computing capacity across corporate assets including servers, desktops, laptops, and multi-cloud resources. Additionally, users can now more precisely control when any given compute resources are used based on configurable exclusion windows and usage limits.

The Kazuhm platform represents the first time distributed computing is available as an enterprise-grade product enabling organizations to take full advantage of the computing power they already own across all their devices from desktops, laptops and tablets to servers and multi-cloud environments. Kazuhm allows customers to quickly and easily unify their resources and run enterprise applications faster, more securely, and at a lower cost.

“Kazuhm’s distributed compute software helps True run transcoding on compute assets we already own and save hundreds of thousands of dollars on compute and hardware costs,” said Reed Anderson, CTO, True Corporation. “We are excited about the artificial intelligence-driven insights we will get from this latest release, enabling even more optimization of our resources and therefore cost savings.”

Available to customers in the latest product release, Kazuhm now offers the following features:

Control features include the ability to set exclusion windows for each Kazuhm-enabled device on your network, pause and resume work on those devices, add additional resources to an existing host group, and manage storage from within the Kazuhm platform.

Kazuhm Scheduler

Monitoring features include a notification center that displays timely and critical information about your Kazuhm-enabled resources, information on Kazuhm-specific CPU usage across devices, and cloud resource status.

Kazuhm Notifications Center

Usability features include a newly streamlined Windows installation process and Google Cloud Platform provisioning capability.

Kazuhm Windows Installer

Kazuhm is applicable across a wide range of end user devices, processor platforms, and operating systems including Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Companies interested in containing their IT costs while improving compute capacity and performance can request a free trial of the Kazuhm platform at https://www.kazuhm.com/.

Kazuhm COVID-19 Response

In related news, Kazuhm announced on March 23 their AI-driven distributed computing solution will be provided free to any organization fighting the coronavirus pandemic. University and private sector research labs, test kit manufacturers, companies providing free or reduced cost video conferencing solutions, and companies who have quickly ramped up manufacturing for items such as hand sanitizer, gloves, and face masks can all take advantage of Kazuhm to increase their computing capacity. This offer is available to any organization across the globe that meets the criteria of contributing to the fight against COVID-19. Visit https://www.kazuhm.com/covid-19-response/ for more information on this offer.

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Kazuhm Provides Free Compute Capacity to Organizations Fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic

Enterprise-grade distributed computing platform enables immediate increase
in compute capacity and storage at no cost

SAN DIEGO—March 23, 2020 Kazuhm today announced their AI-driven distributed computing solution will be provided free to any organization fighting the coronavirus pandemic. University and private sector research labs, test kit manufacturers, companies providing free or reduced cost video conferencing solutions, and companies who have quickly ramped up manufacturing for items such as hand sanitizer, gloves, and face masks can all take advantage of Kazuhm to increase their computing capacity. This offer is available to any organization across the globe that meets the criteria of contributing to the fight against COVID-19.

“COVID-19 is bringing people and organizations around the world together with a singular goal of beating the pandemic and saving lives,” said Rick Valencia, interim CEO of Kazuhm. “The shift in resources, the changeover in manufacturing lines, the ramp up of research labs all takes immense application processing power, and Kazuhm is dedicated to ensuring these teams are getting that processing power as easily, efficiently, and securely as possible.”

Universities, research labs, non-profits, hospitals, and enterprises across sectors are struggling to meet the sudden demand for everything from hand sanitizer to respirators to online learning and meeting solutions. The Kazuhm platform can help these organizations quickly and easily unify the compute resources they already own to maximize distributed storage and application processing power.

In many organizations, compute resources such as desktops, laptops and servers go unused approximately 70% of the time. Kazuhm represents the first time distributed computing is available as an enterprise-grade product enabling organizations to take full advantage of the computing power they already own across all their devices from Linux, MacOS, and Windows desktops, laptops and tablets to servers and multi-cloud environments. Industry proven in applications for genomics research, data analytics, and image and video processing, Kazuhm allows customers to quickly and easily unify their resources and run any containerized application faster, more securely, and at a lower cost. A user-friendly interface and integrated dashboards enable simple setup, AI-driven insights, and complete control.

Companies interested in containing their IT costs as well as improving compute capacity and performance while fighting the COVID-19 pandemic can sign up for this free offer at https://www.kazuhm.com/covid-19-response/.

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Rick Valencia Joins Analytics Ventures as Operating Partner

Former Qualcomm Executive Brings Vast Experience in Driving Operational Growth to Kazuhm

SAN DIEGO—Dec. 18, 2019 Analytics Ventures, a fund dedicated to creating and building venture companies that harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI), announced today that Rick Valencia has joined the Analytics Ventures leadership team, taking on the role of operating partner. Mr. Valencia’s primary function will be to help Analytics Ventures-backed companies transition from successful startups to independent, fast-growth technology companies.

“Rick Valencia is an astute investor, entrepreneur and diligent operations executive capable of rapidly scaling ventures with exceptional technology and early traction,” said Navid Alipour, managing partner at Analytics Ventures. “His technical and operational acumen in combination with his vast network of business and technology relationships will be key to the future success of our ventures.”

Before joining Analytics Ventures, Mr. Valencia was an SVP at Qualcomm and served as President of Qualcomm Life, Inc. after he spearheaded its formation in 2012. As President of Qualcomm Life, Mr. Valencia was also responsible for overseeing Qualcomm’s healthcare venture funds, dRx Capital and Qualcomm Life Fund. Prior to founding Qualcomm Life, Rick founded ProfitLine, Inc., a telecommunications service management provider, and served as Chief Executive Officer from 1992 until the sale of the company in 2009. Rick is also on the Board of Directors of Tandem Diabetes Care, (NASDAQ: TNDM) and is the Executive Chairman of TrekIT Health.

“Having successfully launched multiple AI companies over the past two years with their venture studio model, I feel that Analytics Ventures has a proven approach to leverage the power of AI for company formation across multiple industry verticals,” said Mr. Valencia. “I am excited to join this team of visionary business leaders and exceptional artificial intelligence scientists and look forward to being a catalyst for operational excellence and growth for our venture companies.”

Mr. Valencia’s initial focus as operating partner at Analytics Ventures will be to assist portfolio company, Kazuhm, in commercializing its innovative hybrid compute offering by assuming the role of executive chairman and interim CEO. Kazuhm is an IT technology company enabling next-generation hybrid computing and has succeeded in building an enterprise-grade compute platform that allows application and hardware providers to let their users process more data faster, more securely, and at a lower overall cost. They do this by intelligently unifying a company’s existing, yet underutilized, enterprise compute resources, including desktops, servers, and cloud. He will take on this role with the objective to build out and scale Kazuhm’s operational framework to address the growing demand from enterprise customers.

About Analytics Ventures

Analytics Ventures is a venture studio providing front-to-end infrastructure to ideate, form, launch, and fund brand new companies in artificial intelligence. With its own in-house AI lab, technology, back-office, and marketing setup, Analytics Ventures takes companies from formation to public launch in as little as six months. Winner of the Awards.AI Venture Capital firm of the year for two years in a row, the fund’s ecosystem is supported by a large network of corporate and academic partnerships, as well as other venture funds. To learn more about Analytics Ventures, visit www.analyticsventures.com.

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Kazuhm Expands Support for Microsoft Azure and Windows for Distributed Computing Platform

Containerized workloads run seamlessly across Windows Desktops, Servers, and Azure Cloud

SAN DIEGO, Ca.—October 1, 2019—Kazuhm, a container-based distributed computing platform, today announced the expansion of support across Microsoft Windows desktops and servers, as well as Microsoft Azure cloud for container-based distributed computing. Using the Kazuhm platform, customers can now connect all their Microsoft-based resources to form a powerful compute fabric with the ability to process containerized workloads including multimedia applications such as transcoding or data science applications such as Apache Spark.

As of August 2019, Microsoft Windows held >78% of the desktop OS market according to Statcounter. However, most container management solutions do not address this massive amount of compute resource in distributed computing environments—specifically allowing users to run workloads on desktops. Furthermore, Microsoft reported 41% growth in the Azure commercial cloud business in the first three months of 2019. Kazuhm has extended support for customers using Microsoft servers and desktops for distributed workload processing to now include Azure cloud for unified containerized workload processing from desktop to server to cloud.

“Digital transformation means not only the ability to incorporate cloud-based compute resources, but the ability to optimize all the resources of an enterprise, whether those resources are desktops, servers, or even edge devices,” said Tim O’Neal, Kazuhm co-founder and CEO. Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise is extending from Windows desktops and servers towards Azure cloud services, and Kazuhm allows enterprise customers to take advantage of any part of their portfolio of Microsoft assets to process workloads in the most efficient way possible.”

For more information on Kazuhm support for enterprise Microsoft users, see https://signup.kazuhm.com/ms.

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Kazuhm Wins 2019 NAB Show Product of the Year Award

Next-Generation Workload Processing Platform Recognized for Achievements and Innovation in IT Networking/Infrastructure and Security

San Diego, CA – April 17, 2019—Kazuhm today announced that it received a Product of the Year award at the 2019 NAB Show—a program that aims to recognize the most significant and promising new products and technologies showcased by exhibitors. Kazuhm was specifically recognized in the IT Networking/Infrastructure and Security category.

Kazuhm is a workload processing platform that allows organizations to recapture existing IT resources and intelligently manage work across a fabric of desktops, data centers, cloud, and edge/Internet of Things (IoT). The intuitive user interface (UI) is easy to operate, helping to limit an organization’s dependence on IT support. Enterprise customers typically see such benefits as lower IT and cloud costs, enhanced security, improved performance, and reduction of latency by enabling the right work to be processed on the right resource for the right reason.

“Since our company’s inception, we’ve seen tremendous excitement and opportunity to apply our best-in-class solution to telecommunications, media and entertainment. These industries often require low-latency solutions for delivering entertainment services, or compute resource-heavy applications to support transcoding and rendering,” said Tim O’Neal, Kazuhm CEO. “Regardless of the use case, Kazuhm is well-equipped to meet companies’ growing needs in the space, as our secure, AI-enabled platform delivers optimal compute workload placement and processing across compute resources.”

Adds O’Neal, “We’re honored to be among the first class of technology providers to win an NAB Show Product of the Year award, and hope to harness the present momentum to serve this robust and evolving market.”

NAB Show Product of the Year award winners were selected by a panel of industry experts in 16 categories and announced at an awards ceremony and cocktail reception at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort on April 10. To be eligible for an award, nominated products and technologies needed to be on display at the 2019 NAB Show for the first time and available for delivery in calendar year 2019. Additional details can be found here.

“Nominees like Kazuhm are revolutionizing the way people experience media and entertainment,” said NAB Executive Vice President of Conventions and Business Operations, Chris Brown. “The 2019 NAB Show Product of the Year Awards highlight the best of what’s new at the premier launchpad for breakthroughs at the intersection of media, entertainment and technology.”

To learn more about Kazuhm, including its proprietary video transcoding application, which debuted at NAB this year, please visit www.Kazuhm.com.

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Kazuhm Named a 2019 “Cool Company” by San Diego Venture Group

First-of-its-Kind Workload Processing Platform Joins 32 of the Fastest Growing, Most Exciting Startups in Southern California

San Diego, CA – April 2, 2019—Kazuhm, a next-generation workload processing platform, today announced that it has been recognized as one of only 33 “Cool Companies” for 2019 by San Diego Venture Group. Kazuhm won out amongst more than 250 applicants.

San Diego Venture Group (SDVG) promotes the formation, funding, and development of innovative new ventures in the San Diego community. SDVG’s Cool Companies list highlights the fastest-growing, most exciting startups in Southern California.

“We are grateful for this recognition from San Diego Venture Group,” said Kazuhm CEO Tim O’Neal. “We are proud to call ourselves a member of the San Diego startup community, which we strongly feel is one of the most active, thriving and important startup communities in the United States today.”

Launched in October of 2018, Kazuhm is a commercial-grade distributed computing workload processing platform that empowers organizations to maximize all compute resources across desktop, server, and cloud, all the way to the Edge. The platform enables organizations to recapture and use all existing compute nodes to process containerized workloads, saving IT costs and enhancing performance and security. Its desktop recapturing technology is used by organizations across telecom, healthcare, retail, financial services, higher education and more.

“We were happy to name Kazuhm a 2019 Cool Company,” said SDVG President Mike Krenn. “One of the reasons why we love doing the annual ‘Cool Companies’ list is because it shows how the extremely diverse San Diego tech ecosystem is now a hotbed for all kinds of innovation, in an array of key areas.”

This news comes on the heels of Kazuhm’s recent announcement that it has joined the NVIDIA Inception Program. Inception nurtures dedicated and exceptional startups who are revolutionizing industries with advances in AI and data science.

Kazuhm was also recently named an official nominee in the first-ever NAB Show “Product of the Year” Awards. NAB Show is the world’s largest event focused on the intersection of technology, media, and entertainment. Kazuhm will be exhibiting at NAB (N2739 – The Startup Loft) from Saturday, April 6 through Thursday, April 11.

This year’s Cool Companies event will be on April 30, at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, and will give participants, like Kazuhm, an opportunity to meet with more than 60 venture capital firms and 20 local investors.

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Kazuhm Joins NVIDIA Inception Program

Next-Generation Workload Processing Platform to Receive Industry-leading GPU Tools, Technology and Deep Learning Expertise to Catalyze Business Growth and Success

SAN DIEGO—March 5, 2019—Kazuhm™, the next-generation workload processing platform, today announced it has joined the NVIDIA Inception program, a virtual accelerator program that is designed to nurture startups during critical stages of product development, prototyping and deployment, to revolutionize industries with advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and data science.

Kazuhm is a first-of-its-kind, commercial-grade distributed computing workload platform that empowers organizations to maximize all compute resources across desktop, server, and cloud, all the way to the edge. Its technology enables enterprises across industries—including telecom, healthcare, retail, financial services, higher education and more—to efficiently recapture unused processing power to boost productivity, minimize unnecessary IT investment and improve security.

As a member of Inception, Kazuhm will strengthen its deep learning expertise through powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) tools, hardware grants and best-in-class training in neutral-network machine learning applications, among other benefits.

“Through Kazuhm’s collective industry acumen and our proprietary research, we know the demand for compute resources is growing, and is primarily driven by increases across the Internet of Things (IoT)/edge, and AI and machine learning projects,” said Tim O’Neal, CEO of Kazuhm. “To meet this need head-on, we recognize the value in working alongside industry pioneers, like NVIDIA through its Inception program, to improve our insights and access to game-changing technology and resources. Ultimately, we know this will benefit of our customers and our growth trajectory.”

Kazuhm recently announced the results of its 2019 IT Industry Outlook Report, which surveyed IT professionals’ current and anticipated workload processing and usage habits, sentiments and predictions for the year.

Kazuhm will be presenting a Tech Talk at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley on March 18-21, 2019. Attendees are also encouraged to stop by Kazuhm’s booth during the show (booth #334).