At the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara today, a low-key startup called E8 Storage Inc. has unveiled a scale-out array that it claims ups the performance ante for the entire industry. The system is referred to as the E8-D24 and can carry out ten times more read/write operations per second than traditional all-flash systems from competitors.

The appliance’s speed is owed to the fact it uses NVMe drives originally designed to be fitted in servers as a local storage medium. E8 has included 24 such SSDs in the system that provide a total of 10 million 4KB IOPS with as little as 100µs of random-access latency, which is on par with directly-attached flash. The reason why an organization would want to use E8’s system instead of simply attaching NVME-based storage to its machines is that the former is much easier to manage, at least according to the official sales pitch.

The E8-D24 packs built-in data protection features and makes it possible to centrally provision capacity without the complex software that is necessary to provide such control when using direct-attached drives. Moreover, E8 says that it’s also easier to scale since adding more storage space only requires buying additional units. New systems can be connected to a server cluster over Ethernet using the machines’ built-in network interface chips, which removes the need to create a new network from scratch. The end result is that maintenance operations become simpler all around while hardware expenses are reduced.

E8’s networking technology has the added benefit of making the E8-D24 appear as a local storage device, a feature that removes the need to re-write applications built to run on direct-attached drivers. The startup admitted to The Register earlier this year that making the most out of its appliance often does require making code changes, but that’s hardly necessary for the average workload. Its website states that the array is geared towards databases, analytics systems and other storage-intensive services with high I/O requirements.

A 70 terabyte version of the E8-D24 is slated to become general availability later this year and a 140-terabyte configuration will follow suit in 2017. By the time the second model hits the market, E8 can expect to start seeing serious competition from EMC Corp. and the other better-established vendors that are currently working to develop their own NVMe systems.

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