E8 Storage and Mellanox have announced they're expanding their technology partnership with an integrated solution built on Mellanox BlueField SmartNICs, which will enable customers to maximize computing resources by pairing the E8 agent with the SmartNIC. The new integration will allow users to utilize the benefits of CPU offload to overcome any performance bottlenecks to application performance.  

By offloading the E8 Agent functionality to the Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC, the joint solution allows the compute resources to remain dedicated to the customer's applications.  All the storage data path operations are managed by the dedicated computing resources of the offload engine, not by valuable server compute cores.  The ability to accelerate performance and optimise compute resources is ideal for intensive workloads that need to operate in real time, such as genomics, analytics and AI. 

The integrated solution delivers the proven high performance and low latency of E8 Storage systems, while adding dedicated computing power in a low- profile PCI form factor. E8 Storage delivers 10x the performance of existing flash solutions, with consistent sub-millisecond latency, and has set benchmark records in multiple industries. 

"The combination of the E8 agent with our BlueField SmartNIC is ideal for organizations that need fast and scalable performance," said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox.  "The integration is complimentary and allows customers to take advantage of full acceleration, while adding dedicated computing power, networking and processing subsystems. The result is high performance and acceleration, while significantly reducing total cost of ownership."

Zivan Ori, co-founder and CEO of E8 Storage explained, "The SmartNIC is uniquely designed to offer speed, reliability and high availability, many of the concerns customers face when it comes to optimizing data workloads in data intensive verticals. By offloading the E8 software onto Mellanox BlueField we are able to leverage the benefits to provide a combined solution that meets the demands of high performance compute clusters - enabling fast access to data."