OVHcloud continues to invest in storage

OVHcloud understands its holes in its portfolio and tries to address them rapidly proving some maturity and realism. In my recent post, we pointed some lack of storage flavors. In others words, to compete against the cloud service providers giants, the firm has to react fast by acquiring technology developers due to time to market reason, no doubt about it.

The firm had the opportunity to swallow OpenIO as a real bargain and we mentioned that motivation in the referenced post mentioned above.

Octave Klaba, Chairman and founder of OVHcloud, issued a LinkedIn post a few days ago about a NVMe-oF storage company acquisition saying more news will come in September. Rumors went into many directions but what is sure is the bargain nature of the deal as OVHcloud doesn't spend hundreds of millions in acquisitions. So who can be that vendor? 3 elements are key here: block storage, NVMe-oF and "small" innovative player. Block storage already eliminates some candidates and NVMe-oF reduces the list a lot. Again it's not a question to support NVMe but here the network extension of the protocol is key. We saw many comments issued with completely crazy ideas with names like Lightbits Labs, Excelero and even StorPool. The first two are very expensive due to significant valuation OVHcloud can't afford. StorPool supports NVMe but doesn't say yet anything about NVMe-oF. Kazan Networks disappeared acquired by WDC last year. So I wrote a comment following Klaba post that I see potentially 1 target Exten Technologies, the morph of Mangstor who had difficulties for several years now. We don't know if we accelerate the news - let's stay positive about it - but it is now public as the PR was published this morning.

It makes a lot of sense completing the current block storage service as one of the key trend is data center composable storage architecture based on NVMe-oF capabilities. It will fuel OVHcloud initiative and product in that area to dynamically and seamlessly adapt to container-based workloads. As the time we write this post, nothing is mentioned on Exten web site.

Now a bit of perspective as OVHcloud must offer some file storage service in the NAS world or the technical/scientific/HPC segment with parallel model. Among them it exists a few bargains again like Rozo Systems or Quobyte. Let's wait a few months or less but clearly the company has to do something in that space.