E8 Storage to lead the new NVMf wave

E8 Storage (www.e8storage.com), future leader of the new generation of storage arrays based on NVMe over fabrics, aka NVMf, recently participated to the IT Press Tour end of June and Zivan Ori, CEO and co-founder, based in Israel has made the trip to meet the press team. For references, I already wrote 2 times about E8 Storage and I invite to read May and early July posts.
First let me refresh minds with company info. E8 has less than 2 years of existence, funded in November 2014, having raised so far 2 rounds for a total of $18M from Accel - where we did the meeting in Palo Alto - , Vertex and Magma. The company splits responsibilities between Tel-Aviv for R&D and Santa Clara for Product, Marketing and Management. Zivan Ori came from IBM XIV and previously from Stratoscale with a strong background in software engineering and security. Alex Friedman, CTO and co-founder, came from XIV as well and Valentin Ossman, VP Product Management, came from PMC-Sierra, who co-present the session with Zivan.

To illustrate the shift in the demand for a new storage array approach, Zivan uses the famous RPC - Reliability, Performance and Cost - model also known as the 3P - Protection, Performance and Price. The RPC model was used to position local SSD, AFA, NVMf/JBOD and rack scale HW with also market needs and we realize that all these approaches has limited answers and don't solve all problems.
E8 insists on 2 dimensions - IOPS and TCO - of the solution and the slide #13 illustrates the result against AFA such XtremIO or Pure Storage and PCIe SSD. In 2 words: 10x performance and half the TCO. Wow super promising. Even the product was not available at the time of the presentation, it will be launched in less than one month at Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, specifications and characteristics were of course shared with us, here is an overview with this slide.

In addition, NVMe provides several advantages:

• Low latency,
• High Bandwidth and high IOPS,
• Reduced CPU loads,
• Device consolidation with high components density

We understand that E8 will shake the industry established position very soon now and the battle is on among the few new players such Apeiron, Mangstor, DSSD, Excelero and even AFA leader like Kaminario. Interesting again that this new storage development comes again from new and small dedicated actors not big ones that are just followers, again...