PEAK:AIO CEO on AI Infrastructure & Growth With Partners

PEAK:AIO is changing the way organizations approach infrastructure with new open-source capabilities built for the AI era. We spoke with President and CEO Roger Cummings about the company’s technology and how it works with channel partners to meet end users’ needs.

Why PEAK:AIO’s infrastructure is built for the AI era

PEAK:AIO is a storage vendor promising a solution to companies’ AI-related data workflow challenges. The software-defined storage platform is deployed on servers to deliver ultra-low latency and enough bandwidth to power the GPUs that companies increasingly need to support AI work.

“We have developed a simple, purpose-built software platform for AI and HPC workloads,” said Cummings.

Just this week, the company announced its Open pNFS solution. Touted as the industry’s first fully open-source, vendor-agnostic metadata server, the new offering features a modular, horizontally scalable architecture that allows both metadata and storage performance to grow seamlessly with demand. 

Cummings hails the offering as a response to high market demand and the need to address the complexities of AI workloads in traditional storage deployments.

The key benefits of PEAK Open pNFS include:

• Open Source Metadata Server: Removes vendor lock-in and supports the latest Flex Files standard.
• Linear Scalability: Add performance and capacity modularly, node-by-node.
• Start Small, Scale Big: From a single HA node to exabytes without architecture changes.
• AI & HPC Tuned: Seamless integration with PEAK:AIO’s AI Data Server.
• Edge to Cloud Flexibility: Compatible with existing NAS, Tier 0 deployments, and hybrid models.

“Emerging AI workloads present scaling demands similar to HPC needs but require different access patterns,” said Gary Grider, High Performance Computing Division Leader at Los Alamos National Labs. “To achieve a multi-decadal solution to address the combined and growing requirements benefits greatly from a standards and community-based solution, Open-source solutions like PEAK:AIO’s PEAK Open pNFS promises to address the growing requirements and performance needs and is a very important step towards achieving a flexible base on which community innovation can proceed.”

PEAK:AIO’s technology has found early success with customers in regulated industries, such as healthcare, research, and education, which have myriad AI use cases but must protect data sources as they build models.

“What is so exciting to me is that we have an opportunity to bring a solution to the market that helps organizations get to innovation faster,” Cummings said. 

How recent funding round will expand company’s footprint and capabilities

The company also celebrated its most recent funding round in October.  PEAK:AIO raised over $6.8M in seed funding led by Pembroke VCT, which invested $5 million, with additional participation from Praetura Ventures and a Silicon Valley investor.

“Every major technology wave exposes bottlenecks that hold back progress. In AI, that bottleneck is storage – GPUs sit idle while data crawls in. PEAK:AIO has built a solution from first principles that flips this equation, unlocking the full potential of AI infrastructure,” said Fred Ursell, head of investments at Pembroke Investment Managers. “With a team that has repeatedly scaled and exited category-defining businesses, and early validation from some of the most complex customers in the world, we believe PEAK:AIO is positioned to be a critical enabler of the AI revolution.”

To Cummings, the funding is an opportunity to build additional capabilities (like the recently announced Open pNFS solution) and bring the platform to more customers worldwide. The company was founded in the U.K. and has seen success in the market. With new investment, PEAK:AIO looks to expand that in the U.S.

“We’ve already proven what true AI-first infrastructure can achieve; now we’re scaling that vision. This funding fuels the next phase of PEAK:AIO: open, high-performance, and built to outpace legacy at every level. Our upcoming designs are engineered to set a new standard, one that legacy systems simply weren’t built to reach,” said Mark Klarzynski, co-founder and CSO of PEAK:AIO.

Why partners and channel growth are a key facet of strategy moving forward

PEAK:AIO also works closely with channel partners in various regions to bring the storage solution to more customers. Cummings says the platform enables partners to bring a solution to a common problem: how to manage storage across workloads with as little complexity as possible.

The platform approach also reduces the physical footprint required to scale storage capabilities, another differentiator, Cummings says, that partners can bring to clients as they manage AI-related demands.

As providers are increasingly asked by their clients to support AI deployments and projects deemed strategic priorities, Cummings sees PEAK:AIO as an invaluable piece of the puzzle.

“It’s our job to complement transactions and make it easy for those partners to grow with their customers over time,” Cummings said.

“Working with PEAK:AIO over the years has been invaluable in helping us overcome real-world performance and scalability challenges for our clients. Their new Open pNFS delivers the performance of traditional parallel file systems, but with the simplicity and usability of a true plug-and-play solution,” said Elan Raja, CEO of Scan Computing. “By taking a great standard and making it practical for the modern AI and HPC market, PEAK:AIO has created something genuinely transformative. Our goal is to enable clients to focus on innovation, not storage administration, and PEAK:AIO’s vision, experience, and technology give us the confidence to do exactly that. This marks an exciting new chapter for the entire industry.”