Amazon’s huge headstart may give the tech giant’s a huge advantage in the highly competitive cloud computing space, but competition is heating up and rivals are coming strong. As a result, the company was forced to acquire some companies to beef up its cloud portfolio. The latest acquisition is an Israel-based storage tech startup E8 Storage.
First reported by Reuters, Amazon’s latest deal targets the company’s increasingly growing cloud service. Israeli’s news publication Globes pegged the latest deal at $50 to $60 million, but TechCrunch reported that the price tag was significantly lower than that.
The latest deal is expected to bring additional technology to the company’s cloud computing service, Amazon Web Service or AWS.
The latest addition, E8 Storage
Founded in November 2014, E8 Storage is venture-funded Israel-based enterprise flash storage startup that develops next-generation flash storage technology for the enterprise data centers and software-defined cloud space. E8 Storage is venture-funded by Magma Venture Capital, Vertex Israel, and Accel Partners. According to startup-focused website Crunchbase, the startup has already raised more than $18 million in fresh funds.E8 Storage’s strong focus on high-speed storage technology has clearly caught the attention of the tech giant Amazon.
The startup’s technology is clearly line up with Amazon’s cloud computing business, the AWS.
The storage startup claimed that its high-speed storage systems can deliver 10 times the performance and half the cost of existing storage systems. And there’s even more, last year, the startup added a new storage array equipped with Intel’s Optane drives, which reportedly provides much faster performance than traditional flash appliances.
With the addition of the new Optane-based array to its arsenal, the startup has managed to conquer and even set a new industry performance record in the SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark test, which provides a standard method of comparing a set of file system performance tasks across different vendor platforms.
The latest deal follows Amazon’s two more acquisitions this year.
These are the Vancouver-based data center startup TSO Logic and Israel-based data recovery service CloudEndure. Both companies provide Amazon AWS a huge technology chop in the hotly contested data center space. TSO Logic optimizes data center workloads operating efficiency, while CloudEndure provides a more reliable means of recovery services, especially in the event of system disaster. The US tech giant has been busy beefing up its cloud computing business. Last year, the tech giant has spent a whopping $1.65 billion on acquisitions and deals.
Amazon sues former cloud employee
In another AWS-related story, Amazon is suing a former AWS executive for taking a job with its cloud rival Google. The tech giant is seeking an injunction to prevent former AWS sales executive Philip Moyers from taking a job with Google Cloud for 18 months.
In addition, Amazon has also asked the court to prohibit the former executive from selling to current or prospective AWS customers during that period. The lawsuit was filed at King County Superior Court in Seattle.
This is not the first time the tech giant has filed a lawsuit against its former employee. In 2017, the company sued its former AWS VP Gene Ferrel for taking a job with work collaboration software company Smartsheet.
