Nvidia Acquired Israeli Start-Up Partner Excelero That Raised $35 Million

Blog posted on Nvidia web site

Excelero Storage Ltd., a Tel Aviv, Israel-based provider of high-performance SDS, is now a part of Nvidia Corp.

Nvidia Excelero

The company’s team of engineers – including its seasoned co-founders with decades of experience in HPC, storage and networking – bring expertise in the block storage that large businesses use in SANs.

Now their mission is to help expand support for block storage in Nvidia’s enterprise software stack such as clusters for HPC. Block storage also has an important role to play inside the DOCA software framework that runs on our DPUs.

“The Excelero team is joining Nvidia as demand is surging for high-performance computing and AI,” said Yaniv Romem, CEO and co-founder, Excelero. “We’ll be working with Nvidia to ensure our existing customers are supported, and going forward we’re thrilled to apply our expertise in block storage to Nvidia’s world-class AI and HPC platforms.“

Founded in 2014, Excelero developed NVMesh, software that manages and secures virtual arrays of NVMe flash drives as block storage available across public and private clouds.

Its software has won praise from users for its high throughput, low latency and support for Kubernetes containers. It’s also attracted collaborations with cloud service providers.

The company has been an Nvidia partner since its early days, attracting the former Mellanox, now part of Nvidia, as an investor. It collaborated on accelerating storage with RDMA, a technology at the heart of both IB and RoCE (Ethernet) networks.

Nvidia will continue to support Excelero’s customers. Looking ahead, Excelero’s technology will be integrated into Nvidia’s enterprise software stack.

Comments

This acquisition is interesting because of the paradox is projected. NVMe is hot, NVMe-oF is hot, especially over TCP but at the same time being a player in that domain is not at all a guarantee of success.

We reveal Excelero in May 2016 following a session at the 32^nd International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology aka MSST. At that time, the company has shown lots of ambition, a compelling solution, an attractive product fueled by innovative technology. But then there was some strange choices, failures in marketing with sequential mistakes by same people who failed elsewhere, and a market takeoff that finally didn't happen, some departures, executives shuffle. And it was even surprising that we saw other NVMe-oF player, from Israel but also from other countries, attracting VC money and talents.

For a few years the company disappeared from the stage, having raised just $35 million since its inception in 2014. Among participating VCs, thee was Western Digital who is pretty active on NVMe and NVMe-oF but finally the transaction is signed with a company not at all in the historical financing effort.

Is it the effect of the competition, their approach with a software agent, their recent validation of TCP? It reminds E8 Storage, an other Israeli storage company, with a agent philosophy that finally got acquired for a small amount by Amazon.

For Nvidia, it's a bargain, they acquired an advanced solution that can accelerates their storage model. And it doesn't cost a lot of money so no hesitation at all. It reminds us the penny Nvidia paid for SwiftStack without any mention on their web site. Try to check on nvidia.com and search for SwiftStack, result is zero. For Excelero, it's a bit better as the blog post mentioned above was published by Nvidia but nothing more.

The other good element is the recent cloud move for Excelero especially on Azure.

Nvidia and Excelero partnered for several years as NVMesh relied initially on RDMA, based on InfiniBand or RoCE networks.

The interesting element is that Nvidia picks a block storage player with an intrusive approach, requiring a software agent you must installed on each servers participating in the virtual storage entity. The blog post confirms that the DPU model covered by Nvidia BlueField and the associated DOCA initiative is the rationale behind this acquisition, Nvidia wishing to maintain its place in the leadership group with the growing pressure from Fungible, Pliops, Nebulon, Marvell or Pensando. This announcement invites a comment from Yaniv Romem, CEO and co-founder of Excelero, who insisted on AI and HPC related workloads and projects.