Enterprise flash NVMe storage startup E8 Storage, Inc. has raised $12 million Series B in a round led by Accel that included existing investors Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures.

Founded in 2014, E8 Storage offers next generation flash storage with a rack-scale architecture for the enterprise and software-defined cloud.

The company claims it can deliver 10 times the performance for half the cost of existing storage products while using only off-the-shelf hardware through its appliance, eliminating storage need projections while still being easily upgradeable and expandable. This is to allow data centers to enjoy unprecedented storage performance density and scale.

E8 Storage claims that as the first shared, software-defined NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) solution in the industry, their rack-scale flash architecture has been designed to maximize the performance of NVMe for high-performance enterprise applications; in live beta test, E8’s appliance is said to have delivered unprecedented performance (10M IOPS) and latency on par with local NVMe flash (100us/50us of read/write), making it an ideal choice for use in high-performance enterprise applications such as real-time market data analytics, hyper-scale data centres, and high-performance computing.

“Today’s investment brings us closer to launching our software-centric solution, which is currently in beta testing, as the only scale-out solution in the industry,” E8 Store Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Zivan Ori said in a statement sent to SiliconANGLE. “It provides a rich feature set of data services such as high availability, RAID and thin provisioning, and can be easily scaled and upgraded as hardware components improve. The fast-growing interest in E8 Storage proves that the market for shared NVMe solutions is definitely maturing.”

Future solutions

NVMe is a communications interface/protocol developed specially for SSDs by a consortium of vendors including Intel, Samsung, Sandisk, Dell, and Seagate, but hasn’t necessarily been used well at scale so far in centralized storage while at the same time running on open hardware components with a rack-scale architecture.

E8’s solution is still in beta testing, but by the numbers it sounds like a roll out to a wider audience may well make E8 popular for enterprises looking at scalable NVMe solutions.

Including the new round, E8 Storage has raised $12 million to date.

The company said it would use the new funding to accelerate its go-to-market by hiring a sales and marketing team in the U.S., as well as doubling its R&D team in Israel.

Image credit: E8 Storage.