E8 BUILDS DATA CENTER STORAGE WARES

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has acquired Israel-based storage technology startup E8 Storage. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Following the acquisition, the team of 25 at E8 Storage, which provides flash storage for the enterprise and software-defined cloud, will join the Amazon Web Services development center in Tel Aviv.

Although the cost of this acquisition wasn’t disclosed, Crunchbase reports that E8 Storage has raised $18.3 million since it was founded in 2014 by Zivan Ori (CEO) and Alex Friedman (VP R&D).

E8 Storage develops flash storage installations based on software, which according to the company, provide up to 10 times the performance of other all-flash-arrays, with consistently strong performance and low latency.

Some of the areas where E8 storage technology can be handy includes;

  • Enterprises interested in building a private internal organizational cloud infrastructure.
  • Speed up performance for cloud suppliers such as AWS.
  • Storage installations that allows companies to locate their storage drives away from their local servers in large data centers without forfeiting capabilities and speed.
  • Creation of flexible data centers that can adjust their speed and effectiveness to the customer’s required scale of storage.

In terms of location, this is AWS’ second acquisition in Israel this year, having bought cloud computing company CloudEndure in January for an estimated $250 million.

In 2015, Amazon acquired Israeli data center hardware company Annapurna. The Annapurna group has continued to operate and has since pushed out hardware solutions such as chips for ARM-based computing instances that are available on AWS.

Before the latest acquisition, E8 Storage has been working in collaboration with Intel and Mellanox. Also the company has been marketing its storage products to customers, as part of the full suite of storage solutions that it offers.

AWS continues to power Amazon’s base services. The cloud arm boasts of $8.4 billion in net sales and $2.1 billion in operating profits in the second quarter of this year.