Simplyblock — Enterprise NVMe Storage for Cloud-Native Infrastructure
Purpose-built for Red Hat® OpenShift®, Kubernetes, and mission-critical stateful workloads at enterprise scale.
Simplyblock delivers enterprise-grade, NVMe-first software-defined block storage for organizations running IO-intensive workloads on Kubernetes and Red Hat® OpenShift®. From distributed databases and data warehouses to AI/ML pipelines and real-time analytics platforms, Simplyblock gives platform and infrastructure teams predictable high performance, operational simplicity, and full architecture flexibility — without proprietary hardware or vendor lock-in.
Origin Story
The idea for Simplyblock goes back to co-founder and CTO Michael Schmidt, who was frustrated with the complexity, inflexibility, performance, and pricing of existing storage solutions in the server market. Being a nuisance in the traditional data center market, it is a real concern in the wide world of cloud providers.
So he set off to develop a new storage cluster solution, based on the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), initially designed and open sourced by Intel®, to simplify the daunting task of communicating to NVMe® devices. He got started, and added storage distribution, erasure coding, and remote access.
After working on simplyblock alone for a while, Robert joined him, and they decided to build a company around the new technology.
Together they started out looking for the first additional hires, bringing in additional experience for NVMe®, distributed storage solutions, and many other areas. And in 2022, simplyblock was founded as a company, which many of the early contributors joined full-time. Brought together under the shared goal of solving container storage once and for all.
Simplyblock Leadership
Founded by storage infrastructure veterans with deep roots in NVMe, distributed systems, and cloud-native platform engineering.
Robert Pankow
Co-Founder & CEO
Operator and company builder with a track record of scaling technology businesses across Europe and Southeast Asia. Brings commercial and go-to-market depth to a deeply technical product.
LinkedIn
Michael Schmidt
Co-Founder & CTO
NVMe and distributed storage architect. Created the original SPDK-based storage engine behind simplyblock. Deep expertise in low-latency I/O, erasure coding, and NVMe-oF protocol design.
LinkedIn
Chris Engelbert
Chief Developer Advocate
Developer advocate and distributed systems engineer. Previously at Hazelcast and Instana (acquired by IBM). Brings deep experience in open-source community building and cloud-native observability.
LinkedInTeam backgrounds include
NVIDIA · Mellanox · Instana (IBM) · Hazelcast · TimescaleDB · Intel · Red Hat
Simplyblock is built and supported by a team of 20+ storage architects, platform engineers, and cloud-native specialists distributed across Europe — with deep expertise in NVMe, distributed block storage, and enterprise Kubernetes infrastructure.
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The investors and partners backing Simplyblock's growth.
