StorageCraft aims to provide single system Cohesity and Rubrik-style enterprise converged scale-out storage and data protection for small and medium businesses.
The company bought SMB object storage startup Exablox in January 2017. Exablox built deduplicated scale-out filer arrays using object storage internally.
The OneXafe box from StorageCraft is claimed to be a converged scale-out storage and data protection system for small and medium entreprises’ physical and virtual servers. Exablox had combined StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect backup SW with its OneBlox nodes in October 2016.
At the time we said StorageCraft’s portfolio includes an integrated suite of backup, disaster recovery, system migration, virtualisation and data protection software running on Windows and Linux for small and medium-sized businesses.
Now, in effect the StorageCraft and Exablox technologies have been combined, with StorageCraft saying neither NetBackup, Veeam nor Veritas can offer such a complete or affordable system for SMBs. Roughly similar systems to OneXafe from Cohesity and Rubrik are said to be designed for larger enterprises and be more costly.
There are three models, with OneXafe 4412 and 4417 capacity-optimised systems and an all-flash 5412 version offering instant recovery and fast-access unstructured data to serve primary virtual server production applications.
OneXafe has a patented distributed object-based file system – the Exablox SW technology – that is integrated with data protection services. The file system delivers NFS and SMB data access for primary and secondary storage.
It scales from a single node to a multi-petabyte cluster. The management is delivered remotely as-a-service by a OneSystem facility.
OneXafe has both VMware and VSS integration and provides work flow and capacity usage analytics. The data protection is SLA-based and policy-driven, and data recovery can be pretty much instant; a patented VirtualBoot feature is claimed to deliver terabyte (TB) virtual machine recovery in less than a second regardless of whether deployed on-premises or in the cloud.
StorageCraft OneXafe
An on-premises OneXafe system’s policy’s can replicate data to StorageCraft Cloud Services with a claimed single-click recovery of data, compute, and network services in an orchestrated recovery workflow.
Will SMB’s want a single storage scale-out box with cloud-based management to handle all their storage and data protection needs? If their current system is a complex and costly mess than OneXafe might be an appealing fix.
Datasheets can be found here. OneXafe disk-based 4400 starts at less than $14,000 for 144TB (c$0.095/GB) with the all-flash 5400 series starting at less than $30,000 for 38TB ($0.77/GB). How do these stack up against Rubrik and Cohesity?
A web source says Rubrik’s R334 (3-node, 36TB) backup appliance unit list price is around $100,000 MSRP. That is $2.71/GB, more expensive than StorageCraft’s OneXafe 5400 at $0.77/GB.
A Cohesity pricing web source says a a 3-node Cohesity C2300 (48TB raw, using 4TB disk drives, 800GB PCIe Flash cards per node) starts at $90,000. That’s $1.83/GB, again more expensive than OneXafe’s 4400 at $0.095/GB.
OneXafe products are available from StorageCraft’s channel.
