E8 Storage attracts 12 more millions

E8 Storage (www.e8storage.com), an innovator in Flash-based storage for the entreprise, just announced a Series B with $12M from Accel, Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures. The current total amount raised reaches $18M.
The storage industry really lives a revolution with a few technologies and especially everything related for Flash. E8 Storage belongs to the second wave of players leveraging NVMe huge potential to design and build new offering and to address new applications and business challenges.
The company has developed a radical new approach with a shared NVMe storage appliance able to deliver 10x the performance of existing market AFA, 10M IOPS and very low latency pretty similar to local NVMe devices at a range around 100µs/50µs of read/write. Typical applications could be a trading floor with high frequency trading needs that require high speed and low latency storage back-end. The expertise of E8 Storage resides in storage software for demanding environments and here it translates in performance consistency and guarantee - no need for caching -, data protection with double parity model, access coordination to the shared device and auto balance control via an advanced multi-pathing layer. In term of SSDs, the appliance embeds very standards Intel NVMe SSDs. A joint paper with Intel and E8 Storage was written recently and is available here.

The rest of 2016 will be interested with new players such Mangstor, Apeiron Data Sytems, DSSD (acquired by EMC in May 2014), FlashGrid, Excelero and of course E8 Storage, competing against each other but also against more classic vendors, strange to say, but AFA vendors are now traditional stuff. As a technology it's very interesting to see that NVMe generates 2 different storage architecture approaches: first, a central storage appliance star topology with Apeiron, DDSD, E8 or Mangstor and second, Excelero or FlashGrid where every NVMe SSD is connected locally on edge node building a mesh or peer-to-peer architecture with a shared logical pool. Always good to see new players and new ideas to bring new value and shake the established storage industry palm. And E8 Storage will participate to the 19th edition of The IT Press Tour in June. Super.