E8 Storage: Software Only Product for Pre-Qualified Servers

E8 Storage Systems Ltd. announced its first  software only product offering for a selected range of pre-qualified servers from vendors such as Dell, HP and Lenovo.

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The software, which powers the company’s performance, HA shared NVMe storage solutions is available as a software only purchase for customers to install on their supported hardware of choice.

This announcement marks an expansion of the firm’s go-to-market strategy, which is to extract the potential from its high-performance storage software architecture and open hardware appliances, and give its users a wider choice of how to use the company’s software.

“Enterprises require ever faster infrastructure to handle both new and existing applications, and meeting that need can be complex and expensive,” commented Tim Stammers, senior analyst, Storage, 451 Research. “E8 Storage is pioneering the use of NVMe flash and a software-defined architecture to address this problem. Allowing customers to run E8 Storage’s software on their choice of commodity hardware increases their ability to control costs, as well as making deployments more flexible.“

The customers can choose to purchase the storage software separately or as an integrated company’s system, should they wish to opt for an appliance-led solution. Bought independently, the software enables businesses to utilize hardware from their supported vendor of choice, so long as they are on the pre-qualified list. It also allows companies to take advantage of economies of scale from within their own supply chains and purchase new units at a rate and pace to suit their individual, specific needs. In addition, the firm’s channel partners now have the option to install the software as part of a wider hardware integration project for their customers, increasing their value-add and creating new revenue streams.

“Although today’s announcement is all about making our software more readily available to customers and partners, we will continue to develop and expand of our award-winning appliance-led NVMe enterprise storage solutions to customers who prefer that format,” comments Zivan Ori, co-founder and CEO, E8 Storage. “Today we have shown, once again, that is no longer necessary for businesses to invest in racks of expensive proprietary storage hardware to deliver great performance and get the most from their SSD investment.“

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The company’s software enables customers to unleash the performance of NVMe SSDs with no compromises on reliability or availability. Built on industry standards, including Converged Ethernet with RDMA and standard 2.5″ NVMe SSDs, the software connects up to 96 host servers to each firm’s storage controller, each linked concurrently to shared storage to deliver petabyte scalability. The software delivers the performance, low latency storage and simplified storage management that customers have come to expect, making it for real-time analytics, financial and trading applications, business intelligence and transactional processing.

“Enterprise customers are increasingly seeing the need to scale, whilst reducing their storage footprint but still get the best performance. Thanks to E8 Storage’s software solution, our customers now have different ways they can purchase the solution,” said Quentin Gadd, sales manager, Vector & Scalar Products Ltd. “We are taking advantage of this unique technology, not only is E8 Storage fully in step with our philosophy of simplified, super-fast, high scalability data centre solutions, but there are also outstanding synergies with the rest of our solution stack. We see huge potential to sell a lot of this solution.“