Pliops, a leading provider of data processors for cloud and enterprise data centers, recently showcased themselves at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies conference in Las Vegas. To find out more about that event, and what the company is doing, VMblog spoke with their new CEO appointed earlier this year, Ido Bukspan.
VMblog: As the new CEO of Pliops (appointed earlier this year), please tell us a little about yourself.
Ido Bukspan: I have spent many years in leadership roles in the semiconductors and accelerator industry, and I relish this opportunity to put my experience to work in a new capacity.
Before joining Pliops as the new CEO, I was SVP of Chip Design at NVIDIA. Prior to that I worked for Mellanox in a wide range of positions before being appointed as the leader of the Chip Design Group, which went on to become NVIDIA’s networking products. At NVIDIA, I led Chip Design Networking, an organization with hundreds of employees worldwide, to impressive results.
Before Mellanox got acquired by NVIDIA, the products we were working on were trailblazers, particularly in the field of data centers, AI and high-performance computing.
The excitement surrounding Pliops is palpable. I’m looking forward to leading the company and our amazing team to the next level and expanding into additional markets with a focus on AI.
VMblog: Can you share with us any of your near-term goals for Pliops?
Bukspan: I strongly believe that Pliops is at the forefront of the next data revolution. Our technology and products break away from the norm when it comes to moving payloads in/out of applications and storage. Without a product like Pliops Extreme Data Processor (XDP), that gap will get larger and larger. It is our mission to make the deployment of our products as wide as possible. AI applications, as well data hungry SQL/no-SQL applications, are showing tremendous benefits from Pliops, and we want to make sure those benefits are available to more and more users around the world. Hardware acceleration in the storage industry has not advanced as far as it should have up until now, and we will make that happen.
VMblog: AI is definitely impacting the data center world. How does Pliops’ technology fit into the AI equation?
Bukspan: There are multiple ways we fit in, but to narrow down to some current hot engagements, the work that we are doing with VectorDB solutions on the inference side and the amazing values they are seeing when deploying Pliops XDP should be noted. When it comes to the GPU itself, we are working with key vendors to enable the lowest latency NVMe direct storage based on KV to significantly improve the training of models.
VMblog: Pliops had a significant presence at last week’s Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Las Vegas. Tell us about the company’s involvement with the show.
Bukspan: We previewed our second-generation Pliops XDP. Introduced 2 years ago, XDP has set a new benchmark for data center scaling and efficiency. Providing new levels of processing power and storage scalability for relational, NoSQL and in-memory databases, analytics, AI/ML, 5G, IoT, and other data-intensive applications and platforms, the XDP has changed the landscape for what is possible. Gartner conference attendees were able to preview XDP 2.0, which doubles the performance and capacity of its predecessor.
We demonstrated our XDP Mongo – the fastest MongoDB solution available. Our best-in-class database accelerator for NoSQL applications, XDP-AccelKV, provides a 10x performance improvement to MongoDB applications, while providing game-changing TCO savings to users.
Pliops also joined Lenovo for a presentation detailing how the two companies are working together to empower organizations to successfully deal with IT infrastructure challenges for storing, processing and making sense of vast amounts of data. As part of this collaboration, we were joined by Google Cloud to demonstrate the fastest AlloyDB Omni solution around. This included how the AlloyDB Omni was 4x faster on Pliops XDP-accelerated Lenovo servers than a standard PostgreSQL database.
VMblog: What did attendees to the Gartner show take away from visiting your booth and listening to the Pliops presentation?
Bukspan: That our technology will put their business in a position to conquer the obstacles that today’s dynamic landscape presents – particularly those related to sustainability, performance and scalability. We are dedicated to shaping the future of data infrastructure optimization and workload acceleration, and ensuring that data centers have all of the tools needed to succeed in the AI era.
VMblog: Give us a sneak peek into 2024 for Pliops. What do you foresee as important areas of focus?
Bukspan: 2024 looks to be a very exciting year for Pliops. AI will be an area of significant focus. We will make announcements around collaborations with partners to offer best-in-class database solutions, AI training and inference platforms. We are also planning to launch several innovative products in the coming year.
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