Edge computing hardware startup Pensando Systems Inc. announced today that its flagship Distributed Services Platform is now available as a “factory-supported option” on Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s ProLiant, Apollo and Edgeline Server Platforms.

In addition, Pensando DSP is now available as well on the HPE Greenlake service that brings a cloudlike experience to on-premises infrastructure.

Pensando is a hot startup that emerged from stealth mode last year with more than $200 million in funding. Its key technology is a custom-made chip for data center servers that has been optimized to handle computing tasks related to network management, security and data storage.

The chip is the basis of Pensando DSP, helping provide an alternative to enterprises dealing with an explosion of data that previously only had two options: Scale up capacity in their on-premises data centers, or move workloads to the public cloud.

Pensando DSP is billed as a secure, programmable, edge-accelerated platform that plugs into on-premises servers and offloads compute, networking, storage and security tasks to its custom-designed chip. Pensando says doing so leads to a 40% reduction in central processing unit utilization, which results in some major efficiency gains.

The extra computing power enables data center services to handle much bigger workloads than they otherwise could. And with Pensando’s hardware also taking care of networking, security and storage, it eliminates the need for customers to buy expensive, standalone appliances that typically handled these tasks.

The company said Pensando DSP is designed to plug straight into customers’ existing information technology environments. It can be used alongside many common network virtualization, orchestration and security frameworks.

Pensando said its platform has driven sales growth of 150% in the last year, even with the global COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic slowdown. It says six Fortune 50 companies currently have proof-of-concept deployments with Pensando running on HPE servers.

“We’re very excited with the progress we’ve made in the last six months, in particular what we’ve done with Hewlett Packard Enterprise,” Pensando Chief Executive Prem Jain said in a statement. “As of today, our mutual customers can order truly integrated Distributed Services Platforms based on the world’s best-selling servers and backed by single-call HPE hardware and software support with a single purchase order.”

Photo: Pensando