Outpace.io for a AoE revival

Outpace.IO (www.outpace.IO), leader in AoE aka ATA over Ethernet, continues to surf on the Coraid installed base but also tries to define its solutions portfolio by itself. To reach that level of autonomy, the team have made great effort to promote AoE in many directions for many applications.
Just to summarize, AoE is a storage oriented network protocol to access block storage devices over Ethernet. It's designed to be efficient, simple and cost effective. Since 2005, AoE is integrated in the Linux kernel, it is non routable, there is no IP addressing mode and it belongs to layer 2. With that in mind, Outpace.io has made a new iteration to have a full software implementation of AoE, no HBA and no specific hardware, and they have decided to build their own product line both in back-end storage and in access layer. The back-end is based on commodity x86 servers running Linux with AoE loaded and can be configured as JBOD or RAID arrays. This layer is covered by A-Series. On top of this persistent layer, applications servers access data via specific heads - named Z-Series - that expose some protocols such a block mode, NFS or SMB and S3. I already covered outpace.io in July last year. Last interesting point is the pricing positioning illustrated by the image below.

Now, talking about technology too deeply creates some doubt especially if you're alone in a category, at the end of the day, people need storage, capacity, protection and methods to access data with their applications. Everything else is literature as we say in France.