OVHcloud Acquires Exten Technologies

OVHcloud, largest European cloud provider, acquired the technology of EXTEN Technologies, Inc., a US-based storage software company specializing in NVMe-oF.

With this acquisition of EXTEN’s technology and team, it aims to build and offer to its customers the best performance/price block storage solution in the industry. Based in Austin, YX, EXTEN has been a pioneer in NVMe-oF storage software with over 20 filed patents.

EXTEN offers a disaggregated storage platform that replaces local NVMe drives with flexible shared pools of fault tolerant capacity, without any trade-off on performance. This allows high availability deployments for performance critical workloads, such as databases, video processing and data analytics.

OVHcloud is committed to enhancing its position both organically and through acquisition opportunities capable of boosting growth and catalyzing differentiation in critical areas of development. With the recently announced acquisition of OpenIO, in object storage software technology, OVHcloud has demonstrated its ambition to create for its customers the best and most versatile storage offering available. EXTEN’s technologies match with this mission notably addressing the increasing demand for performance focused workloads.

EXTEN’s workforce, recognized in the ecosystem for their technical skills, will work closely with OVHcloud’s existing team of experts in USA and in the rest of the world.

Comments

OVHcloud continues to invest in storage and it's good for the firm, Europe and France in particular, to balance with other cloud service provider (CSP) giants.

It understands its holes in its portfolio and tries to address them rapidly proving some maturity and realism. A recent article pointed out some lack of storage flavors. In other words, to compete against CSP and their storage services, the firm has to react fast by acquiring technology developers driven by time to market reason, no doubt about it.

The firm had the opportunity to swallow OpenIO as a real bargain and we mentioned that motivation in the referenced post mentioned above.

Octave Klaba, chairman and founder, OVHcloud, issued a LinkedIn post one week ago about a NVM-oF storage company acquisition saying more news will come in September. Rumors went into many directions but what is sure is the bargain nature of the deal as OVHcloud doesn't spend hundreds of millions in acquisitions.

So who can be that vendor?
Three elements are key here: block storage, NVMe-oF and "small" innovative player. Block storage already eliminates some candidates and NVMe-oF reduces the list a lot. Again it's not a question to support NVMe but here the network extension of the protocol is key. Many comments issued with completely crazy ideas with names like Lightbits Labs, Excelero and even StorPool. The first two have significant valuation OVHcloud can't afford. StorPool supports NVMe but doesn't say yet anything about NVMe-oF. Silk, the name of Kaminario, has also a high valuation and can't be purchased by OVHcloud. Pavilion Data Systems, Liqid or DriveScale same thing. Kazan Networks got acquired by WDC like E8 by AWS or Vexata by StorCentric, all 3 in 2019. Apeiron Data Systems has a proprietary NVMe-oF implementation. But OVHcloud wishes to acquire software for datacenter agility. We wrote a comment last week following Octave Klaba LinkedIn post that we saw potentially one target, Exten Technologies, the morph of Mangstor who had difficulties for several years now. We don't know if we accelerate the news - let's stay positive about it - but it is now public as the press release was published August 26, 2 days ago, not in September.

It makes a lot of sense completing the current block storage service as one of the key trend is data center composable storage architecture based on NVMe-oF capabilities. It will fuel OVHcloud initiative and product in that area to dynamically and seamlessly adapt to container-based workloads. As the time we write this post, nothing is mentioned on Exten web site, see below.

Now a bit of perspective as OVHcloud must offer some file storage service in the NAS world and/or the technical/scientific/HPC segment with a parallel access model. Among them, it exists a few bargains again like Rozo Systems or Quobyte, 2 attractive companies. Let's wait a few months or less but clearly the company has to do something in that space as well.