Nvidia said it acquired Excelero, a Tel Aviv-based block storage specialist for high-performance computing applications that has a strong connection to Mellanox Technologies, the high-speed networking company Nvidia acquired in 2019.
“There is definitely a tie-in to Nvidia around high speed networking (that they got from Mellanox) and the need to do high speed, efficient and NVMe-based large block storage systems,” said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. “Since Nvidia sees itself as the premiere HPC provider of systems, storage is a critical component of that effort, and so having this company under their roof makes lots of sense.”
Mellanox, also based in Tel Aviv, Israel, was an early investor in Excelero and partnered with the storage technology firm. This week’s Excelero acquisition was announced almost three years to the day that Nvidia announced it was buying Mellanox for about $7 billion (a deal which closed in 2020.) This should make it easier for Nvidia to integrate Excelero into its growing Nvidia Israel operation.
Nvidia also worked with Excelero prior to the acquisition. “The company has been an Nvidia partner since its early days… We collaborated on accelerating storage with RDMA, a key technology at the heart of both InfiniBand and RoCE (Ethernet) networks,” an Nvidia blog post stated.
The post added that Excelero's new mission "is to help expand support for block storage in our enterprise software stack such as clusters for high performance computing. Block storage also has an important role to play inside the DOCA software framework that runs on our DPUs."
Excelero is known for NVMesh, software that manages and secures virtual arrays of NVMe flash drives as block storage available across public and private clouds, and can help Nvidia raise the performance bar for HPC applications like AI, machine learning and metaverses.
“Often, the performance of an HPC installation is limited by the storage system performance, so anything you can do to improve that performance is a big step in maximizing system performance,” Gold said, adding, “While this probably is not the largest acquisition that Nvidia has or will make, it nevertheless is a key technology to add to their IP and product family.”
Financial terms of the Excelero deal were not disclosed.