Our Story
Virtualise Anything. Any Time. Anywhere.
The hypervisor is the foundation for all of the cloud applications we rely on at home and work today - whether for working from home, online shopping, streaming music, catching credit card fraud or mapping the human genome.
Julian Chesterfield, SunlightTM founder and CEO, was one of the team that built the first Open Source hypervisor, Xen (now owned by Citrix), as a spin-out from Cambridge University back in 2003. Xen still powers the majority of the public cloud, including Amazon Web Services.
Sunlight was born out of a collaboration with ARM in 2013 to build a lightweight hypervisor that could virtualise low-power processors. Traditional virtualisation was too ‘heavy’, so we rearchitected the hypervisor to remove this “virtualisation tax” (the performance lost by virtualising the hardware) - enabling applications to run as if they were running on ‘bare metal’.
We realised the potential of this for today’s digital enterprises that rely upon databases, analytics, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to drive their core business processes and decision making. As the volume of data these applications consume grows exponentially, and data processing moves to the edge, traditional virtualisation technologies simply aren’t architected to keep up. This makes virtualising these applications prohibitively expensive as way more infrastructure than necessary has to be deployed.
We created the Sunlight hyperconverged infrastructure stack (HCI) - consisting of NexVisor coupled with new software defined storage and networking components, all optimised for the latest advances in storage and networking technology, such as NVMe and 100G networking, with two key design principles: performance and simplicity.
Virtualise Anything. Any time. Anywhere. NexVisor runs the most demanding applications in your datacenter, in the cloud and at the edge, unlocking infrastructure savings of 50-70%. Gone are the days of paying the virtualisation tax. It’s time to move on. It’s time for Sunlight
