Nvidia Acquires Excelero To Bring High-performance Storage To GPU, DPU

‘The opportunity was to bring Excelero’s core expertise not only to GPUs (graphics processing units), but also to our DOCA DPUs (data processing units). Having the expertise of people who worked on the other side of the API is important to show us what we need to build,’ says Chris Lamb, vice president of Nvidia’s GPU computing software platform.

Nvidia Monday said it has acquired software-defined storage technology developer Excelero as part of a move to improve support for block storage in Nvidia’s enterprise software stack.

The technology of Excelero, which is Nvidia’s third storage-focused acquisition, will become part of Nvidia’s Magnum IO technology for developing a modern, GPU-accelerated data center, said Chris Lamb, vice president for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s GPU computing software platform.

Nvidia has been partnering for some time with Excelero because of Excelero’s long-time relationship with Mellanox Technologies, a developer of InfiniBand and Ethernet technologies that Nvidia in 2019 acquired in a deal worth $6.9 billion, Lamb told CRN.

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Nvidia declined to discuss terms of the acquisition. Tel Aviv, Israel-based Excelero was founded in 2014, has raised $35 million in funding and has 69 employees, according to Crunchbase and LinkedIn.

Nvidia’s Magnum IO stack is a suite of technologies, APIs, and libraries to accelerate storage and communications over GPUs, Lamb said. Excelero brings high-performance access to file, block, and object storage to full lifecycle applications running on Nvidia GPUs, he said.

Nvidia felt it was important to move beyond the collaboration stage to actually acquire Excelero and make it part of Magnum IO, Lamb said.

“The opportunity was to bring Excelero’s core expertise not only to GPUs (graphics processing units), but also to our DOCA DPUs (data processing units),” he said. “Having the expertise of people who worked on the other side of the API is important to show us what we need to build.”

With the acquisition, Nvidia will continue to support existing customers of Excelero’s software-defined storage technology, but will discontinue the product, Lamb said.

“We’re not a storage company,” he said. “Offering software-defined storage is not our business. But we find the technology compelling, and so will build it into our platform.”

The move to discontinue Excelero as a stand-alone offering is consistent with Nvidia’s previous acquisitions, all of which become part of the company’s software stack, Lamb said.

This includes Mellanox and object storage technology developer SwiftStack on the storage side, network operating system developer Cumulus, and high performance computing cluster developer Bright Computing.

“We believe the data center is the unit of computing,” he said. “A computer needs an operating system, I/O subsystems, APIs. This fits into the theme of making the data center accessible as an optimized computer.”