E8 Storage

About E8 Storage

E8 Storage, founded in 2014, was an Israeli company that developed high-performance, software-defined flash storage solutions for enterprise data centers and cloud environments. The company was established by Zivan Ori, who served as CEO, along with Alex Friedman, the VP of R&D, and Ziv Serlin, Director of Systems Architecture. The founders leveraged their extensive experience in the enterprise storage sector; Ori was previously the R&D Manager for IBM's XIV high-end storage system, and both he and Friedman are veterans of elite Israeli army technological units.

E8 Storage specialized in creating NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) technology designed to deliver extremely low-latency and high-bandwidth access to data. The company’s core business involved providing rack-scale architecture that utilized off-the-shelf hardware, which it claimed could deliver up to ten times the performance at half the cost of competing all-flash arrays. Its product, the E8-D24 appliance, was a 2U server that could house 24 NVMe solid-state drives, including support for Intel Optane media, and its software was compatible with servers from major vendors like Dell, HPE, and Lenovo. This architecture was particularly suited for data-intensive and high-performance applications such as real-time analytics, financial trading, and large-scale file systems. The business model focused on selling these advanced storage systems to enterprises building private clouds and to cloud service providers seeking to accelerate performance.

Over its lifetime, E8 Storage raised approximately $18.3 million in funding from investors including Accel, Magma Venture Partners, and Vertex Ventures. The company's work gained industry recognition, including being named a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2018. A significant milestone occurred in July 2019 when Amazon acquired E8 Storage for an estimated $50-$60 million. Following the acquisition, the E8 Storage team was integrated into Amazon Web Services' (AWS) development center in Tel Aviv to enhance AWS's own cloud infrastructure capabilities.