As enterprises accelerate their migration to the cloud, many face the paradoxical challenge of rising costs in exchange for greater flexibility and scale. For mission-critical databases that power applications requiring instant responsiveness, the expense is often tied to a metric known as provisioned input/output operations per second, or IOPS. This model, where cloud providers charge a premium for guaranteed performance, has become a significant financial burden for companies managing large-scale, high-transaction data workloads.
A company named Tessell is addressing this economic friction with a patented technological approach that re-architects the relationship between cloud computing and storage. By enabling databases to run on a high-speed storage protocol called Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), the company’s platform eliminates the need for expensive provisioned IOPS. This strategy not only delivers superior performance but also achieves substantial cost reductions, allowing businesses to modernize their data infrastructure without the prohibitive price tag typically associated with high-throughput cloud database services.
The High Cost of Cloud Database Performance
In the public cloud ecosystem, performance-intensive databases from providers like Oracle and Microsoft are often bottlenecked by storage speed. To solve this, major cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform offer premium storage tiers that guarantee a specific number of I/O operations per second. This “provisioned IOPS” model ensures that applications have the consistent throughput they need for tasks like online transaction processing, large-scale analytics, and real-time data ingestion.
While effective, this solution comes at a steep price. Customers pay for a fixed level of performance regardless of whether they use it continuously, leading to significant overprovisioning and wasted expenditure. For businesses with demanding but fluctuating workloads, the cost of ensuring peak performance at all times can become a primary driver of their cloud infrastructure budget. This financial pressure forces many organizations into a difficult choice: either absorb the high operational costs or throttle their application’s performance and risk a degraded user experience.
A New Architecture Using NVMe Storage
Tessell’s core innovation involves shifting database workloads from expensive network-attached provisioned storage to local NVMe drives within the customer’s cloud environment. This approach leverages a technology that offers fundamentally better performance at a lower operational cost.
Understanding NVMe Technology
Non-Volatile Memory Express is a modern communication protocol and driver specification designed specifically for accessing high-speed storage media like flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs). Unlike older protocols such as SATA, which were created for slower mechanical hard drives, NVMe takes full advantage of the parallel nature of flash memory. This results in dramatically lower latency, higher IOPS, and greater throughput, making it an ideal foundation for I/O-intensive database operations.
Bypassing Provisioned IOPS Charges
By running databases on infrastructure that uses local NVMe storage, the need to purchase guaranteed performance from the cloud provider’s block storage service is eliminated. The performance is inherent in the hardware itself, providing direct, high-speed access to the data. Tessell has developed a patented system that manages this infrastructure within the customer’s own cloud account. This allows companies to achieve throughput and responsiveness that often exceeds the highest tiers of provisioned storage, but without the associated per-operation charges that inflate cloud bills.
Quantifiable Gains in Cost and Speed
The transition to an NVMe-based architecture delivers two primary benefits simultaneously: reduced costs and increased performance. According to Bala Kuchibhotla, the Co-Founder and CEO of Tessell, customers typically realize a cost reduction of 35–40% on their database infrastructure. This savings comes directly from the elimination of provisioned IOPS charges, which often constitute the largest portion of the expense for high-performance databases.
In addition to the financial advantages, the technology provides a significant boost in application responsiveness and data throughput. Because NVMe offers a more direct and efficient path to the storage media, database queries, transactions, and analytical workloads complete faster. Kuchibhotla describes this as a “win-win-win situation,” where customers get a more responsive and powerful system for a fraction of their previous cost, creating a more efficient and sustainable model for cloud data management.
Secure, In-Account Deployment
A critical aspect of Tessell’s methodology is its commitment to data security and customer control. Unlike many database-as-a-service (DBaaS) providers that manage data in their own hosted environments, Tessell’s entire platform operates within the customer’s existing public cloud account. This means that a company’s sensitive data and the underlying infrastructure never leave its own secure cloud perimeter.
This “in-account” model is a crucial differentiator for enterprises in regulated industries or those with strict data governance and sovereignty requirements. It ensures that the customer retains full ownership and control over their data, security postures, and networking configurations. Tessell provides the management and optimization layer, but the data itself remains securely housed in the client’s chosen cloud environment, aligning with modern best practices for cloud security and data management.
A Collaborative Approach to Modernization
Tessell’s strategy is built on pragmatic modernization rather than a disruptive overhaul. The company’s “lift and shine” philosophy acknowledges the massive investments enterprises have already made in their digital ecosystems. The goal is to build bridges from existing systems to a more efficient future, minimizing the risk and complexity of migration.
This collaborative spirit is demonstrated in its partnership with Collectors Universe, a platform for authenticating collectibles. Tessell worked with the company to migrate its database systems, delivering improved performance at a lower cost point. The initial success led to a rapid expansion of the partnership, validating the technology’s impact and the strength of Tessell’s customer-centric approach. With this model, the company aims to establish itself as a viable challenger to the default database services offered by major cloud providers, offering a highly differentiated service that spans all major clouds.
