Intelligent bare-metal automation software startup MetalSoft Cloud Inc. is on the radar of enterprises today after announcing a $16 million Series A round of funding led by DNS Capital.

MetalSoft is a four-year-old startup that’s looking to take advantage of the recent reverse cloud trend that has seen some enterprises rethink their public cloud strategies and move certain kinds of workloads back to their own information technology infrastructure.

The company is the creator of intelligent bare metal server automation software that’s used to manage internal data centers and multivendor hardware. The software can be applied to a single rack of servers and scaled to cover multiple data center facilities across the globe.

It takes all of a company’s server resources and makes them available to be consumed on-demand by different users and applications, similar to how the public cloud works. In effect, MetalSoft says, it can “cloudify” on-premises data centers.

Because of this, enterprises can automate the management of their on-premises data center resources while allowing users to design, deploy and operate their own bare-metal infrastructure via a simple user interface or application programming interface.

The extensive capabilities of MetalSoft’s software include automatic server management that covers the deployment and configuration of the operating system software, Basic Input Output System or BIOS, and redundant array of inexpensive disk or RAID systems, plus firmware upgrade management.

MetalSoft further automates network management, covering areas such as network topology tracking, the setup of virtual local area networks, the configuration of operating system internet protocols and other tasks. Automatic storage management is another key aspect of its software, which encompasses the configuration of storage volumes, allocation of IPs to storage pools, storage-related OS network configuration and snapshots.

Finally, MetalSoft provides users with a single blueprint that defines their entire, global IT infrastructure, including servers, storage and networking, simplifying everything and increasing flexibility, the company said.

According to MetalSoft, the main advantage of using its software is that enterprises have a way to pull workloads back from the public cloud and run them in-house, where they can run much more efficiently on customized infrastructure. MetalSoft says it has found a receptive audience for its software, with a number of unnamed Fortune 500 companies using it to manage their on-premises data centers.

“Our capability to fully automate hardware, including switches, servers, and storage across multiple vendors and data centers and then ‘cloudify’ them is unparalleled,” said MetalSoft founder and Chief Executive Lucas Roh. “DNS Capital shares our vision that every company can utilize our software platform to become more efficient while delivering cloud capabilities to their end users.”

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