Amazon has acquired Israeli high-performance storage technology startup E8 Storage for an estimated $ 50-60 million. However, the two companies have not communicated anything on the subject

Founded in 2014 by storage industry veterans from IBM-XIV, its current CEO Zivan Ori and R & D Vice President Alex Friedman. As part of the deal, E8 Storage is supposed to merge with Amazon Web Services (AWS) development center in Tel Aviv. Israeli media outlet Globes first reported the deal.

The startup develops flash storage with a rack-scale architecture for the enterprise and software-defined cloud. It delivers 10 times the performance for half the cost of existing storage products. E8 Storage’s appliance E8-D24 is the first array that provides an uncompromised trifecta by combining the high performance of NVMe drives, the high availability and reliability of centralized storage, and the high scalability of scale-out solutions.

The company is venture-funded by Accel Partners, Magma Venture Capital and Vertex Israel, with R&D operations in Tel Aviv, Israel, and sales and marketing in Santa Clara, California. E8 Storage has raised a total of $18.3M in funding over 2 rounds. The earlier funding was raised on May 10, 2016 from a Series B round.

The acquisition should cement Amazon’s leadership position in the market for public cloud infrastructure, staying ahead of Microsoft, Google and others. AWS has come to be an important profit contributor 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.

This is not the first Israeli company to enter the world of e-commerce to boost its IT business. Last January, it was CloudEndure which was bought for 250 M €.