Exclusive Interview With Zivan Ori, CEO and Founder, E8 Storage

Who is Zivan Ori?

He is:

• CEO and founder, E8 Storage Inc.

He was:

• R&D manager, IBM XIV
• Chief architect, Stratoscale, Inc.
• WiMax software manager and architect, Intel
• Wifi driver architect, Envara Inc. (acquired by Intel)
• VP R&D, Onigma (acquired by McAfee)
• and before that at Israel Defense Forces as software developer of innovative things

StorageNewsletter.com: NVMe and NVMf (NVM Express over Fabrics) are more and more mentioned in the press and analysts predict a rapid growth of the market. Since you introduced the product last summer, how do you see that trend?
Zivan Ori: NVMe has certainly taken over the local SSD market, replacing SATA SSDs in laptops, desktops, servers and hyper-scaler data centers, and it is on track to replace SAS SSDs with the introduction of dual-port NVMe SSDs. NVMf is a nascent technology and E8 Storage is proud to be the first NVMf based product in production. We believe NVMf will grow in the next couple of years as networking and NVMf solutions mature.

You announced a VC round series B last year for a total of $18.2 million, did you plan another round this year?
No.

OK, understood but raising money is also a way to resist to acquisition and control your destiny? Did you already receive some acquisition offer? No doubt but you’re probably not ready for that as you lived one with XIV? But we agree it’s just a question of price, right?
We are focused on execution to our company vision and product strategy. We have no comment relative to acquisition questions.

What about your team, we have seen some people turnover in your company? Any troubles, divergence of opinion, business difficulties or just VC pressure?
This question does not apply to E8 Storage. Since our founding 2.5 years ago we have had 99% retention of employees.

Are you your revenue in the range less than $1 million, $1 to $5 million, $5 to $10 million?
We are very pleased with the traction we are seeing both in the US and EMEA. However, we are not disclosing financials at this time.

How many customers do you have?
We are working on references and case studies with our customers and will publicize them as they are ready.

What are the use cases that justify the choice of a rack-scale storage array such E8 Storage? Applications related to fast trading, large booking/ticketing system such Sabre or Amadeus?
Our entry into the market is with customers using local SSDs as persistent storage. Anywhere SSDs, SATA, NVMe or DAS are used for persistent storage, the customer is making a compromise on shared and centralized storage. Our architecture provides high performance, low latency and high availability with no compromise.

The main applications we are seeing interest from are databases – both structured (SQL, OLTP, Oracle, columnar like Vertica or kdb+) and unstructured (NoSQL, Cassandra, Splunk, MongoDB). But what’s really amazing about E8 Storage is that it enables customers to create new applications, e.g. machine learning, I0T databases and analytics, real-time analytics, quantitative trading and financial market data, business intelligence.

What about pricing?
Pricing for our E8-D24 2U appliance is $2-$3/GB. The appliance is completely off-the-shelf without any hardware customizations. The E8-D24 is the world’s first highly available NVMe enclosure.

And for your international presence? You started your channel recently and announced a few partners, can you elaborate on market, education, business opportunities?
The market traction we’re getting is unbelievable, particularly for a company whose product became generally available within the last year. At our size, we cannot satisfy all the requests we’re receiving from international markets, so we have chosen to focus strategically on the U.S. and Western Europe only.

And OEM?
We are focused on growing our presence in our target market and are working with our channel partners towards that goal as we announced in June.

What about competition? We see some players active on same segment but with some different implementations, I mean Mangstor or Apeiron Data Systems? What about other Israeli players such Kaminario, we heard they have some business challenges and still don’t offer yet any NVMf solutions?
We have not run into any of these players in the field. Our main competition is local SSDs, i.e. the status quo. To convince a customer to move its local SSD into a shared deployment, we need to:

• Guarantee performance on par with the local SSD: We achieve that by being optimized for NVMe drives and RDMA networks.
• Achieve high availability in order not to introduce a ‘large blast radius’ (that doesn’t exist with local SSDs, their failure affects only the server they are installed in): E8 Storage is the first product in the market with high availability for NVMe drives, support for dual-port hot swappable NVMe drives, NVMf multi-pathing, no single point of failure, and RAID-6 that operates at the latency of NVMe drives and at the aggregate throughput and bandwidth of all the SSDs in the box.
• Provide some value-add to the customer: We provide the ability to manage shared data from a simple management console, including dynamic storage provisioning and network QoS.

What we hear from all our customers is the same: E8 Storage’s technology is disruptive and they have never seen anything like it.

Some players, like Datrium or Pavilion Data Systems, with no current NVMf solutions but NVMe support try to criticize your approach especially on capability to share array, to provide functions in the host versus in the array …  and still deliver a super fast storage service, what do you think?
Our premise has always been to use commodity hardware. The only solution in existence to achieve the performance we achieve and yet stick to commodity hardware is via host acceleration. Certainly, one can build very complex custom hardware like Pavilion but I believe the experiences of Violin and DSSD have already shown what that leads to. Customers want off-the-shelf hardware. Our vision is sticky software, open hardware.

What are your opinions on lack of answers and products from the usual storage gorillas like Dell/EMC, Hitachi, HPE, IBM, NetApp?
I am certain all of them are working on their own solutions. However, incumbents always suffer from the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’. Focusing on NVMf is just one area of focus for them. E8 Storage has developed a clean-slate architecture for NVMe and NVMf, and as such provides performance that is simply unparalleled. Even when incumbents introduce NVMe into their arrays (which none have done so far), and even if they introduce NVMf backend or front-end, they will still have a fraction of the performance of E8 Storage.

Pure Storage has started with a all-flash block array and then they introduced FlashBlade with file and object interface with some success, is it something you wish to do as well or you plan to stay only focus on block access?
We are focused on block access only. As a start-up, we need to be laser focused and excel at what we do, which for us is block rack-scale flash.

More globally, what are the next steps for E8?
We have some exciting announcements planned for Flash Memory Summit in the next few weeks.

Read also:
Start-Up Profile: E8 Storage
In centralized NVMe enterprise all-flash solution
by Jean-Jacques Maleval | 2016.09.28 | News