Intel and Mellanox embrace Israeli E8’s memory technology

12 August, 2016

E8 Storage developed a SSD based storage technology for data centers and large organizations. Though the company’s product was only released this week, Intel and Mellanox have already adopted the technology

E8 Storage developed a SSD based storage technology  for data centers and large organizations. Though the company’s product was only released this week, Intel and Mellanox have already adopted the technologyE8

Though Israeli startup E8 Storage unveiled its product only this week, it already enjoys the cooperation of two true giants – Intel and Mellanox. The two industry leaders push the Israeli company’s technology into world markets. E8 joins a long list of Israeli companies which changed the storage industry over the last few years. This week, the company unveiled its novel storage device for data centers and organizations.

E8 founder and CEO Zivan Ori
E8 founder and CEO Zivan Ori

The company developed the rack-scale NVMe over Fabrics E8-D24 array, which is highly customizable for organizational needs, and enables quick enlargement at will. NVMe, an abbreviation for Non-Volatile Memory express is a logical device interface specification for accessing no volatile media attached via PCI Express bus. The specification allows level of parallelism found in modern SSDs to be fully utilized by the host hardware and software. NVMe was announced the first NVMe products in 2014, but the specification was considered suitable only for local storage devices and not for implementation in data centers or organizations due to many problems including; data management difficulties, reliability issues and long response times.

Full support by Industry Giants

E8 overcame MVMe’s shortcomings by using specialized hardware which tackles the bottlenecks and failings of this architecture, as well as a software that enables decentralized management of all the storage components. E8’s array is based on NVMe components and Ethernet NIC units. The new storage appliance achieves latency on par with local SSD latency by optimizing for 40/50/100GE networks. The E8-D24 also extracts the full performance of the SSDs and provides up to 88% capacity utilization of the SSDs.

E’8 founder and CEO Zivan Ori said that “Our Tier-1 North American POC customers have already recognized that the cost-performance of E8 Storage puts it in a league of its own. At 10 million IOPS, with 100µs latency, E8 Storage has broken new ground as the highest performing storage appliance based on commodity hardware ever to hit the market. We’re also seeing huge interest from a variety of high-growth vertical market segments”. Currently, E8 offers a 70TB in a 2U rack unit, promising to launch a 140TB version next year.

Intel SSD products making use of E8's technology
Intel SSD products making use of E8’s technology

E8 actually enjoys the backing of the two most important players in the data center market: the Israeli company works in close cooperation with Intel, which distributes parts of E8’s technology integrated into Intel’s D3700/D3600.

This week, E8 anf Mellanox announced a thechnology partnership designed to deliver an end-to-end shared NVMe solution for high-performance enterprise storage applications.  The integration of E8 Storage’s rack scale flash architecture with the Mellanox Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network adapters enables converged networking with very low latency and very high throughput and bandwidth. This announcement coincides with today’s launch of E8 Storage’s D24 flash appliance – the industry’s first centralized, highly available NVMe solution.

“E8 Storage introduces unparalleled high performance and low latency for cloud and enterprise storage applications by allowing usage of shared NVMe in a centralized fashion, yet without compromising on the inherent benefits of local SSD usage,” said Zivan Ori, CEO and co-founder of E8 Storage. “By partnering with leading eco-system vendors like Mellanox, we are able to offer customers an all-in-one proven solution.

 A $12 million funding round

E8 Storage was founded in 2008 by CEO Zivan Ori and CTO Alex Friedman. Mr. Ori held the position of IBM XIV R&D Manager, being responsible for developing the IBM XIV high-end, grid-scale storage system, and served as Chief Architect at Stratoscale, a provider of hyper-converged infrastructure. Friedman managed IBM XIV’s core R&D department responsible for all aspects of IBM XIV’s storage stack software development.

This May, the company has raised $12 million  in a Series B round led by Accel together with existing investors Vertex Partners and Magma Venture Partners.

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