LakeSail today announced a strategic partnership with Oxide Computer Company to help enterprises modernize their data and AI infrastructure while maintaining greater control over security, performance, and cost.
The partnership follows the successful technical validation of Sail on the Oxide Cloud Computer. Sail, LakeSail’s open-source, Rust-native, Spark-compatible compute engine, ran successfully on Oxide’s integrated, rack-scale cloud computing platform, establishing a validated foundation for secure, customer-controlled data and AI environments.
LakeSail and Oxide bring complementary technologies to the partnership. Oxide provides an integrated cloud computing platform designed to deliver a cloud-like operating experience within a customer’s own data center. LakeSail provides Sail as an open-source execution engine that enables organizations to run existing Spark-compatible workloads without the cost and complexity of a traditional JVM-based environment.
For enterprises requiring additional operational capabilities, LakeSail offers the LakeSail Platform. Built around Sail, the LakeSail Platform is designed to simplify enterprise deployment, management, governance, observability, security, and support for data and AI workloads at scale.
Addressing a growing enterprise need
Enterprises building data-intensive and AI applications increasingly want the flexibility and operating experience of the public cloud while retaining greater control over their infrastructure, data, security posture, and long-term costs.
At the same time, many organizations have made substantial investments in Apache Spark applications and skills. Rewriting those workloads for an entirely new platform can be expensive, time-consuming, and disruptive.
Oxide provides an integrated system encompassing compute, networking, firmware, virtualization, storage, and a unified control plane. Its architecture includes a hardware root of trust and mechanisms for verifying the integrity of the system’s software stack.
Sail preserves compatibility with familiar Spark APIs, SQL, and DataFrames while using a Rust-native execution architecture. Sail supports Python workloads and open data formats, including Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake, enabling organizations to modernize their compute layer while preserving existing applications and data architectures.
By eliminating the traditional JVM execution layer, Sail reduces costs and performance bottlenecks associated with cluster startup times, garbage collection, memory tuning, idle capacity, and infrastructure overprovisioning. Depending on the workload and configuration, LakeSail has demonstrated performance improvements of up to 10x and infrastructure-cost reductions of up to 98% compared with equivalent Spark and JVM-based deployments.
Enterprises can deploy and use Sail as open-source software or purchase the LakeSail Platform for the additional capabilities and commercial support needed to operate production environments at scale.
Potential customer benefits
The partnership is intended to provide enterprises with:
Greater infrastructure control. Organizations can operate data and AI workloads on infrastructure they own and manage within their chosen environment.
Security across the stack. Oxide’s hardware root of trust and integrated system design complement Sail’s memory-safe, Rust-native architecture and the enterprise capabilities of the LakeSail Platform.
A practical modernization path. Sail runs Spark-compatible SQL and DataFrame workloads without requiring enterprises to rewrite their entire application estate.
Open-source flexibility with an enterprise path. Organizations can begin with open-source Sail and adopt the commercial LakeSail Platform when they require additional management, governance, observability, security, and support.
More predictable economics. Customer-owned infrastructure reduces reliance on consumption-based public-cloud pricing, while Sail uses compute and memory more efficiently than traditional Spark deployments.
Support for emerging AI workloads. The validated architecture supports isolated, observable, and controllable environments for data pipelines, model preparation, retrieval, and agentic applications.
Executive perspectives
"As data management and processing become more central to AI, we're excited to see LakeSail running on Oxide. Running LakeSail's modern execution engine on Oxide's on-prem Cloud Computer allows customers to gain insights from their data faster while maintaining the control over where that data lives."
— Steve Tuck, Co-Founder and CEO, Oxide Computer Company
“At LakeSail, we believe data processing and AI belong in the same engine, rather than in separate systems that customers have to stitch together. What draws us to Oxide is that they are asking equally fundamental questions about the compute environment itself. The ambition is to give people more room to build, without asking them to inherit more complexity.”
— Shehab Amin, Co-Founder and CEO, LakeSail
Why Oxide and LakeSail
Oxide is seeing growing interest from AI companies and other infrastructure-intensive organizations seeking systems that provide security, operational control, and verifiability. LakeSail is addressing a related need among data teams: preserving compatibility with widely used Spark interfaces while reducing costs and moving beyond the performance and operational constraints of traditional JVM-based workloads.
Together, the companies provide a straightforward modernization path: preserve the applications and interfaces enterprises already use while giving them new choices for the compute engine, enterprise software platform, and infrastructure beneath those workloads.
Availability
Sail is available as open-source software. The commercial LakeSail Platform and Oxide Cloud Computers are sold and supported separately by their respective companies. Customer evaluations based on the validated configurations are available to qualified enterprises.
Organizations interested in participating in an evaluation or learning more about the partnership may contact hello@lakesail.com.
About LakeSail
LakeSail is the company behind Sail, an open-source, Rust-native, Spark-compatible engine for data and AI. Sail is designed to run existing Spark workloads faster and at a fraction of the infrastructure cost of JVM-based Spark, with support for Python, open lakehouse formats, and agentic workloads.
The LakeSail Platform is designed to provide the management, governance, observability, security, and support enterprises need to operate Sail-based data and AI workloads at scale. LakeSail was co-founded by Shehab Amin and Heran Lin.
Media contact
Peter H. Jackson
Chief Strategy Officer, LakeSail
Media inquiries: hello@lakesail.com