Excelero Storage

Founded in 2014, Excelero Storage was a Tel Aviv-based company that developed software-defined block storage solutions before being acquired by Nvidia in March 2022. The company was established by co-founders Yaniv Romem (CEO), Lior Gal (initially CEO), Ofer Oshri (VP of R&D), and Omri Mann (Chief Scientist), who brought extensive experience in high-performance computing (HPC), storage, and networking. Yaniv Romem, a serial entrepreneur, had previously co-founded other technology startups like Xeround and Picatel, focusing on high-performance distributed computing and storage. This expertise was foundational to Excelero's core mission.

Excelero’s business centered on providing high-performance storage for demanding applications in sectors like AI, machine learning, big data analytics, and HPC for clients including NASA and InstaDeep. The company operated on a software-defined storage (SDS) model, allowing enterprises to use standard, off-the-shelf hardware to build incredibly fast and scalable storage networks. This approach aimed to deliver the performance of local NVMe flash storage with the flexibility and cost-efficiency of centralized, disaggregated systems.

The company's flagship product was NVMesh, a software platform that virtualized and pooled NVMe solid-state drives across a network. A key feature of NVMesh was its ability to create a distributed block layer, enabling applications to access this pooled storage as if it were local, with minimal latency—adding as little as 5 microseconds of overhead. This was achieved through its patented Remote Direct Drive Access (RDDA) protocol, which bypassed the server CPU for many storage tasks, offloading them to the network card. NVMesh was designed for on-premise, private cloud, and, later, public cloud environments like Microsoft Azure.

The company's journey culminated in its acquisition by Nvidia in March 2022 for an undisclosed amount. This event was a logical progression of a long-standing partnership, which included an investment from Mellanox (later acquired by Nvidia). Following the acquisition, Excelero's engineering team and its technology were integrated into Nvidia's enterprise software stack to enhance support for block storage within Nvidia's Data Processing Units (DPUs) and the DOCA software framework. While Nvidia pledged to support existing Excelero customer contracts, it announced the discontinuation of future Excelero products and branding, absorbing the talent and technology into its broader platform strategy.

Keywords: software-defined storage, block storage, NVMe, NVMesh, high-performance computing, data storage, enterprise storage, flash storage, storage virtualization, server SAN, low-latency storage, Nvidia acquisition, Yaniv Romem, AI storage, distributed storage, storage-area networks, NVMe over Fabrics, cloud storage solutions, data center infrastructure, RDMA