E8 Storage Raises $12 Million Series B

E8 Storage, an early-stage enterprise storage company based in Israel, announces a $12 million series B financing round led by Accel Partners, with participation from existing investors Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures.

The investment will help the company to launch its next-generation flash storage with a rack-scale architecture for the enterprise and software-defined cloud.

As new generations of high-performance enterprise applications come to market, businesses are trying to find ways to improve the performance and latency of their data centres. This has led to the introduction of NVMe, a new standard of flash storage which is faster than previous generations of flash storage. NVMe has the potential to unlock performance improvements and enable a new generation of applications to emerge. However, existing flash array architectures were not designed with NVMe devices in mind. Because of this, enterprises are missing out on NVMe’s huge potential to make high-performance applications run much cheaper and faster.

As a shared, software-defined NVMe solution, E8 Storage’s rack-scale flash architecture has been designed to maximise the performance of NVMe for high-performance enterprise applications. The solution performs 10x faster than existing all-flash arrays with lower total costs. In live beta tests, E8’s appliance has delivered (10 million IO/s) and latency on par with local NVMe flash (100μs/50μs of read/write). E8 combines these performance metrics with the benefits of software-based centralised storage, making it a choice for use in high-performance enterprise applications such as real-time market data analytics, hyper-scale data centres and high-performance computing.

Zivan Ori, CEO and co-founder of E8 Storage, stated: “We are excited to have Accel join our existing investors Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures. Today’s investment brings us closer to launching our software-centric solution, which is currently in beta testing, as the only scale-out solution in the industry. It provides a rich feature set of data services such as high availability, RAID and thin provisioning, and can be easily scaled and upgraded as hardware components improve. The fast-growing interest in E8 Storage proves that the market for shared NVMe solutions is definitely maturing.”

As part of the funding round, Accel’s Kevin Comolli, who led the investment, will be joining E8’s board.

Comolli said: “The next generation of high-performance enterprise applications such as big data analytics and IoT data processing require a fundamental rethink of our existing data centre architectures. E8 has built a game-changing storage product, and the overwhelming feedback from its beta tests has demonstrated strong product market fit for its rack-scale flash solution. We have been very impressed with the team from the outset and we’re confident in the company’s potential to become a leading player in enterprise storage.”

E8 Storage will use the new funding for accelerating its go-to-market by hiring a sales and marketing team in the US, as well as doubling its R&D team in Israel. E8 Storage was founded in 2014 by Zivan Ori and Alex Friedman who serve as CEO and VP R&D respectively.

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by Jean-Jacques Maleval | 2015.03.23 | News