E8 Storage Case Study

Challenge

Israeli startup E8 Storage, albeit genuinely disruptive, was wholly unknown and faced an uphill battle in an overly crowded market with big name, long-time players. This required a public relations program to drive the company’s debut with a launch at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS).

PR objectives for the launch were to educate the market; de-position existing vendors; build awareness and visibility of E8 Storage and its technology among storage decision makers to establish leadership; and establish E8 Storage’s co-founder & CEO Zivan Ori as a thought leader and storage innovator.

STRategy

Launch the storage industry’s first-ever centralized, highly available rack scale flash appliance based on Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) drives by conducting introductory briefings with industry analysts and media prior to the FMS, while pursuing onsite meetings and demonstrations with media and analysts attending the conference. In addition, leverage participation in IT Press Tour prior to FMS and establish and build a social media presence for on Twitter and LinkedIn to increase awareness and visibility of the company and participate in storage industry dialogue.

Results

Pre-briefings and FMS onsite briefings with 16 journalists/analysts
18 pieces of original coverage published with an additional 18 stories based directly on the press releases
E8 Storage won the Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology Award in the Array category at the Flash Memory Summit based on a nomination by Rainier
High-quality, relevant Twitter followers through organic growth, along with a 34% increase in followers on LinkedIn, exceeding goals
In a seven-month period, Rainier effectively gained coverage in every storage publication of importance to the US market and positioned the company and its CEO as leaders in the industry

“IDC Research storage research director Eric Burgener said the all-flash market is diverging into several classes of storage, and E8 is among one of the emerging classes…Burgener puts E8 Storage in a third category of dense systems capable of more than 10 million IOPS and sub-100 microsecond latency for the most performance-needy apps, such as real-time data analytics. Others in E8's category are EMC's DSSD D5 and startup Apeiron Data Systems' ADS1000, a 2U 24-drive storage system that supports NVMe over Ethernet and scales out with software handling failover and automatic replication.

‘But E8 has a very different cost structure than DSSD,’ Burgener said. ‘E8 says anybody thinking of using local SSDs should look at its product. This includes people looking at hyper-converged. E8 provides a disaggregated storage model that can scale compute and storage independently. That's one of the things you can't do with hyper-converged.’” - Dave Raffo, SearchStorage: “E8 Storage brings out 'software-defined DSSD' NVMe array,” August 8, 2016

E8 Storage

Storage Start-up Makes Legacy Players Appear Irrelevant in Wake of “Uncompromised Trifecta” Launch

Challenge

STRategy

Results

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