Amazon is buying the NVMe-over-Fabrics startup E8 Storage for $50m-$60m.
The news is reported in the Israeli Globes IT news website and the acquisition price is an estimate.
E8 was founded in 2014 by CEO Zivan Ori, VP R&D Alex Friedman, and Ziv Serlin, Director of Systems Architecture. It has raised $18m in funding in two rounds and has about 25 employees in Tel-Aviv.
E8’sproduct technology provides NVMe-oF access to an all-flash array giving accessing applications low latency access to data at high-bandwidth. Optane (3D XPoint) media is supported.
Its software can run on servers from Dell, HPE and Lenovo. The E8 array, a scale-out, 2U, 24 x 2.5-inch slot, dual processor server system, is integrated with ThinkParQ’s BeeGeeFS clustered parallel file system to deliver files faster to high performance computing customers.
E8 reported a SPEC SFS2014 benchmark result using Optane in August 2018 to demonstrate its speed.
Blocks & Files thinks AWS may well use E8 technology inside its own infrastructure. It may have ideas about using it in its on-premises edge devices.
When the acquisition closes E8’s Israeli team will join AWS in its Tel-Aviv facility.
Another NVMe-oF startup, Excelero, also has a BeeGeeFS integration. CEO and co-founder Lior Gal told us: “E8’s acquisition by AWS is a huge validation that NVMe-oF technologies are here to stay as the future of storage networking and innovation. We are delighted that AWS, which is always being followed by everyone, is now publicly showing commitment to scale-out NVMe using intelligent clients to achieve scale.”
