A couple of weeks ago Apeiron and its VC backer trumpeted a global OEM deal with HPE. There is less to this than meets the eye.
Making its debut in August 2017, Apeiron’s ADS1000 system can use Optane SSDs and delivers superfast performance, according to benchmark tests performed by ESG, an IT analyst firm. The Apeiron Data Fabric uses NVMe over Ethernet in a proprietary way and requires Altera FPGA-boosted HBAs and 40Gbit/s Ethernet switches.
President and CEO Chuck Smith came on board in January this year. He is an 18-year HPE veteran and, possibly coincidentally, Apeiron announced the global OEM partner deal with HPE in July. This see the ADS1000 integrated with ProLiant DL360 Gen10 servers. Apeiron gets to take advantage of HPE’s global reach, manufacturing capability and support. It does not mean that HPE sales will sell the integrated HPE/Aperion kit. In effect, HPE will build it and deliver it when Apeiron’s channel sell it.
Apeiron is one of many NVME-oF startups. Will it make the cut? The company appears to be tiny and funding is opaque. Certainly the operation is lean, with no heads of operations, sales, marketing or finance listed on its website or LinkedIn. There’s no PR agency and LinkedIn lists only 14 employees. CFO Rebecca Freeman left in May and sales veep Jim Steed left this month for a sales director role at Nutanix.
We sent questions to Apeiron last week and will update this story if and when it replies.
