Amazon buys Israeli high-performance storage technology startup E8 Storage

Amazon has bought Israeli high-performance storage technology startup E8 Storage for an undisclosed amount. Israeli media outlet Globes first broke the news. The small Israeli startup builds flash storage for the enterprise and software-defined cloud. As part of the deal, E8 Storage will merge with Amazon Web Services development center in Tel Aviv, the source added. Israeli media outlet Globes first reported the deal.

E8 Storage was founded in 2014 by storage industry veterans from IBM-XIV, Zivan Ori and Alex Friedman, who serve as CEO and VP R&D respectively. The company is venture-funded by Accel Partners, Magma Venture Capital and Vertex Israel, with R&D operations in Tel Aviv, Israel, and sales and marketing in Santa Clara, California. E8 Storage has raised a total of $18.3M in funding over 2 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on May 10, 2016 from a Series B round. .

The startup provides the next generation of flash storage with a rack-scale architecture for the enterprise and software-defined cloud, delivering 10 times the performance for half the cost of existing storage products. E8 Storage’s appliance E8-D24 is the first array that provides an uncompromised trifecta by combining the high performance of NVMe drives, the high availability and reliability of centralized storage, and the high scalability of scale-out solutions.

The acquisition will also cement Amazon leadership position in the market for public cloud infrastructure, staying ahead of Microsoft, Google and others. AWS has come to be a crucial provider of profit for Amazon as a whole. Part of AWS’ strategy has been to design custom infrastructure to meet its own needs, and acquisitions have contributed to that effort.