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.
LinkedInTeam backgrounds include
NVIDIA · Mellanox · Instana (IBM) · Hazelcast · TimescaleDB · Intel · Red HatSimplyblock 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.
You share our vision?
Come work with usWe were surprised how much room for optimisation there still is in data storage, something that at first glance might seem like a commodity and highly optimised thing. The deep-tech nature of such technology makes it relatively sticky and innovation must be radical for the users to make the switch. The technology change in storage usually happens in 10-20 years cycles. Simplyblock is tackling the problem from a really innovative angle, breaking many of the existing paradigms in terms of how storage is accessed and consumed, and we believe that they can be a leader of the next technology wave in cloud storage.
Backed and Partnered
The investors and partners backing Simplyblock's growth.
