Mellanox invests in CNEX Labs and Pliops

Mellanox Capital, which is the investment arm of Mellanox Technologies, has made equity investments in storage start-ups CNEX Labs and Pliops, both of which are pushing software defined and intelligent storage to the next level of performance, efficiency, and scalability.

CNEX Labs, which targest high-performance storage semiconductors, has developed Denali/Open-Channel NVMe Flash storage controllers/

Pliops is transforming data center infrastructure with a new class of storage processors that deliver massive scalability and lower the cost of data services.

“Mellanox is committed to enabling customers to harness the power of distributed compute and disaggregated storage to improve the performance and efficiency of analytics and AI applications,” said Nimrod Gindi, senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions and head of investments, Mellanox Technologies. “Optimizing datacenter solutions requires faster, smarter storage connected with faster, smarter networks, and our investments in innovative storage leaders such as CNEX Labs and Pliops will accelerate the deployment of scale-out storage and data-intensive analytics solutions. Our strategic partnerships with these innovative storage mavericks are transforming the ways that customers can bring compute closer to storage to access and monetize the business value of data.”

With Mellanox, NVIDIA targets full compute/network/storage stack

NVIDIA agreed to acquire Mellanox in a deal valued at approximately $6.9 billion.

The merger targets data centers in general and the high-performance computing (HPC) market in particular. Together, NVIDIA’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker. Mellanox pioneered the InfiniBand interconnect technology, which along with its high-speed Ethernet products is now used in over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers and in many leading hyperscale datacenters.

NVIDIA said the acquired assets enables it to data center-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater utilization and lower operating cost for customers.

“The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world’s datacenters,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacenter-scale compute engine.

“We share the same vision for accelerated computing as NVIDIA,” said Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox. “Combining our two companies comes as a natural extension of our longstanding partnership and is a great fit given our common performance-driven cultures. This combination will foster the creation of powerful technology and fantastic opportunities for our people.”