Multi-purpose storage system supplier StorONE has made some exec changes.
Chief revenue officer Chris Noordyke has been promoted to general manager, and Jenn Null, head of demand generation, is now head of marketing. George Crump, previously chief marketing officer and then chief product strategist, has left the company.
Gal Naor, StorONE co-founder and CEO, said: “Jenn is the right person at the right time, for today and for where the company will be soon. I was impressed by how much impact she had in a short time bringing a new marketing direction based on her deep experience.”
Null said: “As a marketer, when you’re given the chance to work with a company whose product will change the market, you take it. I am thrilled to be a part of StorONE at this pivotal time in the company.”
Null will lead product marketing, channel marketing, and digital initiatives. The company said she will plan and implement “scalable marketing programs that will be instrumental in continuing to facilitate StorONE’s rapid growth.”
There are strong indications here that this self-funding company is growing despite the general economic situation.
StorONE, founded in 2011, came out of the same Israeli storage software reinvention crucible that produced Infinidat (founded in 2010), Reduxio (2012) and VAST Data (2016). They all looked at existing SAN and NAS systems and thought they could do better by starting again.
Infinidat concentrated on the high-end SAN array market with its predictive memory caching. VAST Data rewrote a file-based storage OS with a Disaggregated Shared Everything (DASE) hardware-software design. Reduxio, now Ionir, rethought storage principles and devised its HX/TimeOS hybrid array, which stores data objects and restores them to any point in time. It offered near-SSD performance from a hybrid flash-disk array but ran into problems. All three took the venture capital dollar in multiple funding rounds and went for growth.
StorONE took its startup funding and $30 million A-round in 2012 and entered a five-year development purdah in which it said little publicly and developed its TRU (Total Resource Utilization) storage OS that provides file, block and object storage from a single array supporting both disks and SSDs. The system was launched in 2017.
Since then it has plugged away, not taking in any more funding and selling systems supporting virtually any storage use case you could think of – Optane-enhanced IOPS, backup, all-flash, containers, whatever. Without a VC-funded dash for growth and eschewing a single file or block or object or other customer market, its array is an all-in-one Swiss Army knife of a system with no single market identity. Over the last five years it has built a channel, emphasizing its combination of performance and general applicability, and grown organically. It’s one to watch.
