Start-Up Profile: E8 Storage

Company
E8 Storage

Location
HQs in Santa Clara, CA, and R&D center in Tel Aviv, Israel        
    
Date founded
November 2014
 
Financial funding    
Seed funding round in December 1, 2014 from Magma Venture Partners ($3 million) and Vertex Ventures ($3 million). Series B on May 10, 2016, $12 million from Accel Partners, Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures.

Revenue
Currently in the pre-sales stage

Main executives

• Co-founder Zivan Ori, CEO, was formerly 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. Prior to IBM XIV, he headed software development at Envara (acquired by Intel) and served as VP R&D at Onigma (acquired by McAfee).
• Co-founder Alex Friedman, VP R&D, previously managed IBM XIV‘s core R&D department responsible for all aspects of XIV’s storage stack software development. Before joining IBM, he worked at Wanova, a virtualization startup acquired by VMware, and managed an R&D group at an Israeli government organization.
• Valentin Ossman, VP product management, was formerly senior froup director at Cadence where he was in charge of distributed software platforms. Prior to that, he was in the CTO office at PMC-Sierra, where he incubated new products and technologies. He also founded Tehuti Networks, a company building high performance storage-networking solutions. He also held various R&D positions at Siliquent (Broadcom), Galileo (Marvell) and Cisco.
• Ziv Serlin, director system architecture, is an expert in the field of architecture, design, prototyping and integration of complex systems in the areas of storage systems and networking. He had experience as a system architect and management positions at companies such as Primary Data Inc., IBM XIV where he managed hardware R&D department, and Commex Technology (high performance networking ASIC).
• Danny Melamed, director R&D, led IBM XIV‘s test organization, after joining IBM through the acquisition of Diligent he was in charge here of the development team.
• Ron Herrmann, director sales engineering, worked previously at IBM (after the Diligent acquisition). He also held positions at several start-ups including Prominet, Agile (both acquired by Lucent) and Cereva (acquired by EMC). He also served as the systems group leader for the Michigan Supreme Court and worked at Chipcom (acquired by 3Com) and Timeplex (acquired by Unisys)

Number of employees
30

Technology    
E8 Storage provides a centralized NVMe enterprise storage solution, delivering 10 times the performance for half the cost of existing storage products, according to the vendor. The company’s rack scale all-flash array eliminates storage need projections, is upgradeable and expandable, enables converged Ethernet networking, and increases SSD utilization “to over 90%.”

Products description    
E8 Storage E8-D24 is based on open hardware architecture and uses NVMe drives and Ethernet NICs to deliver a cost-effective solution. It features fast random-access latency that guarantees application availability and overall response times without any need for caching. The appliance achieves latency on par with local SSD latency by optimizing for 40/50/100GbE networks. The E8-D24 also extracts the performance of the SSDs and provides “up to 88% capacity utilization of the SSDs.”

Enterprise Servers with an E8 Driver

Features of E8-D24 storage appliance:

• Offers high flash density, with 70TB in a 2U rack available this year and 140TB next year.
• Field serviceable and upgradable 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs
• Supports converged Ethernet networking
• Delivers high availability, enabled by dual controller boards, a no single point of failure enclosure and dual-parity RAID-6
• Designed for tier-1, high duty cycle usage, supporting non-disruptive software and hardware upgrades and battery backup
• Scalable to over 100 servers per rack
• “Delivers half the total cost of ownership of any rack scale storage on the market“
• Software-defined fine capacity and performance provisioning

Released date
August 8, 2016

Price
Pricing will be disclosed when the product will be available.

Availability
The E8-D24 will be generally available later this year, as well as the E8-S10.

Technology partners    
Include Mellanox and Intel

Distribution  
E8 Storage is selling directly to start, and will work with channel partners/distributors in the future.

Customers    
Currently working with beta / Proof of Concept customers (under NDA)

Applications    
Tier-1 usage and high duty-cycle applications; high performance applications including real-time analytics, HPC, machine learning, distributed key-value stores, SQL and NoSQL databases.

Target markets
Hyperscale data centers, financials, retailers, HPC.

Competitors    
The solution is an alternative to local SSDs, as well as products from EMC DSSD, Mangstor, and many others.