StackIQ's $11M Bet on the Warehouse-Grade Server

Before Kubernetes and Terraform, a San Diego startup was automating bare metal for big data. Its 2017 acquisition by Teradata tells a story about a different cloud.

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About StackIQ

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You are staring at a rack of identical, unlabeled servers. Their power cords snake into a tangle on the data center floor.

Your job is to turn this hardware into a Hadoop cluster. The old way: CDs, checklists, a week per server.

Circa 2010 software saw the rack as one entity. This was StackIQ's promise. The San Diego startup founded in 2006 spent a decade and $11 million on it [Crunchbase, Unknown].

The bet on bare metal automation

StackIQ bet on "warehouse-grade" automation for big data and HPC [Channel Futures, Unknown].

Focus was physical servers. Suite like Rocks+ and StackIQ Boss automated lifecycle [CB Insights, Unknown]. It integrated provisioning, configuration, monitoring.

Enterprises gained hours over weeks. Infrastructure became code early.

Funding a niche and finding an exit

Classic pre-cloud-native path. $5 million Series A in 2011, $6 million Series B in 2014. Backers: Anthem Venture Partners, Avalon Ventures, OurCrowd [Crunchbase, Mar 2011] [Crunchbase, Oct 2014].

Capital refined clusters for big data. Traction in finance, research, analytics.

October 2017: Teradata acquired for Everywhere, IntelliCloud [PR Newswire, Oct 2017]. Prize was cluster deployment IP.

The cultural question of infrastructure

Time capsule of data center complexity.

Built for owned racks. Scale meant metal. Bottleneck was configuration.

Teradata buy shows value in on-premises for vendors. Bet on messy reality found buyer.

A counterfactual written in containers

Paradigm shift, not rival, challenged StackIQ.

  • The abstraction layer. Clouds like AWS hid bare metal.
  • The orchestration standard. Docker, Kubernetes made portable units.
  • The toolchain ecosystem. Terraform, Ansible modularized.

Late Docker support [Canadian Insider, Unknown]. Acquisition validated niche utility.

Sources

  1. [Crunchbase, Unknown] StackIQ - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stackiq
  2. [Channel Futures, Unknown] StackIQ: Big Data and the Cloud Demand 'Warehouse-Grade' Automation | https://www.channelfutures.com/data-centers/stackiq-big-data-and-the-cloud-demand-warehouse-grade-automation
  3. [CB Insights, Unknown] StackIQ - Products, Competitors, Financials, Employees, Headquarters Locations | https://www.cbinsights.com/company/stackiq
  4. [Crunchbase, Mar 2011] Series A - StackIQ - 2011-03-10 | https://www.crunchbase.com/funding-round/98b39af4-e447-9ba5-04fb-cd00c315df19
  5. [Crunchbase, Oct 2014] Series B - StackIQ - 2014-10-20 | https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/stackiq-series-b--d4c5d65b
  6. [PR Newswire, Oct 2017] Teradata Acquires San Diego-based Start-up StackIQ | https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/teradata-acquires-san-diego-based-start-up-stackiq-to-strengthen-teradata-everywhere-and-intellicloud-capabilities-300487752.html
  7. [Canadian Insider, Unknown] StackIQ announces support for Docker Community Edition and Docker Swarm | https://www.canadianinsider.com/stackiq-announces-support-for-docker-community-edition-and-docker-swarm-for-easy-and-accelerated-deployments-of-docker-containers-on-bare-metal

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