45Drives, the enterprise infrastructure division of the Protocase Companies, announced expanded market availability of the Proxinator VM2, a compact hyperconverged virtual compute and storage platform originally engineered for a Fortune 500 enterprise deployment. The platform addresses infrastructure challenges in environments with severe physical constraints while maintaining enterprise-grade performance.
The Proxinator VM2 was developed in response to a complex infrastructure challenge from a global Fortune 500 e-commerce organization seeking open-source-based virtual compute, GPU support, and high-throughput NVMe storage in a platform capable of operating outside traditional data center environments. The customer required a system that could be deployed consistently across distributed global offices, many of which lacked dedicated data centers or full-sized IT rooms.
To meet these constraints, 45Drives engineered a solution delivering enterprise-grade performance within a 1U, short-depth chassis specifically designed to mount in network switch racks, not standard server racks, without sacrificing compute density, storage bandwidth, or virtualization performance. The customer required a single point of accountability, asking 45Drives to deliver the complete solution across hardware design, system performance, and long-term support, as no existing off-the-shelf platform met these requirements.
Using its High-Velocity Mass Customization engineering and manufacturing methodology, 45Drives rapidly adapted its existing 2U Proxinator hyperconverged platforms into a new 1U architecture purpose-built for constrained environments. The resulting Proxinator VM2 preserves core performance characteristics of larger systems while dramatically reducing physical footprint and deployment complexity.
Following successful production deployment within the enterprise environment, 45Drives elected to bring the Proxinator VM2 to the broader market. The system was introduced through a detailed performance and design walkthrough video, which generated more than 40,000 views and significant engagement from system administrators, infrastructure engineers, and open-source practitioners. Consistent with 45Drives' open and iterative development model, community feedback on the initial hardware design and feature set was actively reviewed and incorporated into subsequent iterations of the platform.
"The Proxinator VM2 reflects how we solve infrastructure problems that don't fit neatly into existing product categories," said Dr. Doug Milburn, President of 45Drives. "We started with a demanding enterprise workload - distributed virtualization, NVMe performance, GPU support, and severe physical constraints - and engineered a solution from first principles."
Within the 45Drives Enterprise portfolio, the Proxinator VM2 is positioned for organizations that require high-performance NVMe-backed virtual compute but face limitations around rack depth, rack availability, or deployment environments. Offering approximately 33% of the storage capacity of the 2U Proxinator VM8, the VM2 is optimized for use cases where throughput, latency, and compute performance are critical, but total storage capacity requirements are lower.
The Proxinator VM2 is particularly well-suited for edge deployments, branch offices, global enterprise rollouts, and space-constrained infrastructure environments where traditional hyperconverged systems are impractical. The platform is available now as part of the 45Drives Enterprise product lineup. To see the system's design and performance in action, watch the video: "The Ultimate, Compact Hyperconverged Virtual Compute & Storage Solution? The Proxinator VM2!"
