Fabric7 Systems

About Fabric7 Systems

Fabric7 Systems, founded in 2002 by Sharad Mehrotra and Thomas Lovett, was a Mountain View-based startup that aimed to compete in the enterprise server market. The leadership team was comprised of industry veterans; CEO Sharad Mehrotra was involved in the creation of Sun's UltraSPARC-V and had founded Procket Networks, while co-founder and chief server architect Thomas Lovett was the former chief architect for Sequent's NUMA-Q systems and a lead architect for IBM's xSeries. The company secured a total of $45.4 million in funding over three rounds from investors including New Enterprise Associates, Goldman Sachs, Yasuda Enterprise Development, and Selby Ventures.

Fabric7 Systems designed and built enterprise servers that integrated compute and networking technologies for data centers, targeting a market traditionally dominated by Unix vendors like Sun Microsystems, IBM, and HP. The company's business model revolved around selling high-performance server hardware to clients in sectors such as financial services, media entertainment, telecommunications, and web services. Their product line was built on commodity components like AMD Opteron processors and operated on Linux or Windows systems. The core of their offering was a "fabric computing architecture" which unified compute and network services into a single resource pool, allowing for a more dynamic and flexible data center infrastructure.

The company's main products were the Q80 and Q160 server systems, launched in late 2005. A key feature was the Q-Par technology, which enabled hardware partitioning, allowing users to divide a single chassis into multiple, separate virtual servers that could be provisioned on demand. This capability, managed by their Q-Visor software, was previously limited to high-end mainframe systems. The Q160, their higher-end model, could scale up to 14 Opteron processors and featured a built-in, low-latency I/O fabric supporting both Ethernet and Fibre Channel. The Q80 started at $42,000, while the more powerful Q160 was priced from $144,000. Despite its experienced team and substantial funding, Fabric7 Systems struggled with sales in the competitive x86 SMP market and ceased operations in April 2007.