US chipmaker Nvidia has announced the acquisition of Tel Aviv-based high-performance software-defined storage provider Excelero for an undisclosed sum.
Excelero’s core NVMesh offering delivers software-defined block storage using networked NVMe SSDs, whether on-premises or in the private cloud.
Announcing the acquisition, Nvidia said most of Excelero’s team of engineers – including co-founders CEO Yaniv Romem, engineering vice president Ofer Oshri and chief scientist Omri Mann - will join the business, bringing their specialist expertise in block storage.
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“Now their mission is to help expand support for block storage in our enterprise software stack such as clusters for high performance computing,” Suresh Ollala, Nvidia’s Senior Director of Engineering for NGC Storage and Data platform services, wrote in a blog post.
“Block storage also has an important role to play inside the DOCA software framework that runs on our DPUs.”
Founded in 2014, Excelero went on to develop its core software product NVMesh, which manages and secures vital arrays of NVMe flash drives as block storage available across both public and private clouds.
It’s designed to serve up high throughput, low latency and support for Kubernetes containers and has been a focal point for collaborations with major cloud service providers.
The Nvidia acquisition builds on a long-standing relationship between the two companies, with Excelero having been a partner since its early days. The pair collaborated on accelerating storage with RDMA, a key technology at the heart of Nvidia's InfiniBand and RoCE (Ethernet) networks.
In addition to Excelero’s technology being integrated into Nvidia’s enterprise software stack, the chip giant said it will continue to support Excelero’s customers by honouring its existing contracts.
However, Excelero is expected to move forward as an integrated feature of the business and will not operate as its own standalone division.
“The Excelero team is joining Nvidia as demand is surging for high-performance computing and AI,” commented Yaniv Romem, CEO and co-founder of Excelero.
“We’ll be working with NVIDIA to ensure our existing customers are supported, and going forward we’re thrilled to apply our expertise in block storage to NVIDIA’s world-class AI and HPC platforms.”
