AWS acquires storage start-up E8

Amazon has acquired some assets and employees of E8 Storage, a small start-up that built data center data storage hardware. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

A person familiar with the matter confirmed the deal to CNBC on Wednesday and said that all employees received job offers from Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud unit. The Israeli media outlet Globes reported on the deal earlier.

Amazon has long held the leadership position in the market for public cloud infrastructure, staying ahead of Microsoft, Google and others. AWS has come to be a crucial provider of profit for Amazon as a whole. Part of AWS’ strategy has been to design custom infrastructure to meet its own needs, and acquisitions have contributed to that effort.

Now AWS has picked out a company that specializes in hardware that uses flash storage for fast performance. The E8 website boasts that the company’s hardware products “provide up to 10 times the performance of other all-flash-arrays, with consistently strong performance and low latency.”

Amazon bought Israeli data center hardware company Annapurna in 2015. The Annapurna group has continued to operate and has since pumped out hardware such as chips for ARM-based computing instances that are available on AWS.

E8 was founded in 2014. In 2016 it said that it raised $12 million, with investments coming from Accel, Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures.

In 2018 AWS controlled 47.8% of the public cloud market, while Microsoft had 15.5% and Alibaba held 7.7%, Gartner said earlier this week.

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