StorONE has refreshed its software to accelerate auto-tiering, strengthen snapshot-based data protection, and recover faster after a malware attack.
The company provides clusterable storage nodes through its S1 software, now at v3.8, offering virtual storage containers with block, file or object storage. It supports both flash and disk storage, with older data migrated from fast NVMe SSD capacity to slower SAS TLC SSDs, QLC flash, and down to disk drives as a background operation when a StorONE node is less busy. The software supports all storage use cases in a single system, and can deliver 500,000 IOPS from a commodity server with six SSDs.
CEO and co-founder Gal Naor explained in a statement: “The high performance of StorONE efficiently handles data, ensuring universal access and strategic data placement, while seamlessly integrating with various locations and cloud services at the most competitive price.”
StorONE first added auto-tiering between SSDs and disk tiers in July 2022. It claims it’s now “equipped with complex algorithms that can identify workloads and adjust data transfer rates accordingly.” This means the software uses real-time data usage patterns to automate data movement, “significantly enhancing efficiency while reducing administrative overhead and without user intervention.”
The company says it also has “an optimized method to move data to the hard disk tier” and data can be transferred at up to 30TB per hour.”
Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, commented: “Up until now, multi-tiered storage was too costly, too slow, limited protocol support, and/or missing essential enterprise functionality. StorONE is solving this problem with [its] Enterprise Data Storage Platform at a very affordable price.”
Check out a StorONE auto-tiering demo video here.
StorONE’s vSNAP can now store up to 100,000 immutable snapshots on the disk drive tier, offering a recovery point every 60 seconds. It says v3.8 “supports rapid ransomware recovery with high RTO maintaining 12–36 months of snapshots in the HDD tier.”
Its vRAID uses erasure coding and protects against disk failures with the system returned “to a fully protected state in less than three hours, even when using high-density (20TB-plus) hard disk drives.”
The new software is said to strengthen data breach defenses, act as the last line of defense in detecting breaches, and enables rapid recovery in case of a malware attack.
Version 3.8 also delivers a new product installation capability, allowing for full deployment on-site without any cloud connection or the option to connect to the cloud for statistics and management purposes.
Comment
StorONE, apart from its initial $30 million A-round in 2012, has stayed well away from any other VC funding. It is growing its business organically, selling through resellers, and steadily and incrementally developing its software capabilities. Its CEO and co-founder has been in place since it was started in Israel in 2011, as has co-founder and CTO Raz Gordon. The business, now headquartered in New York, has talked about going public next year.
Naor founded and ran Storwize in Israel from 2004, developing real-time, in-line, data compression technology. He sold Storwize to IBM in 2010.
StorONE has not been run like VAST Data or Rubrik or Cohesity. It has steadfastly avoided using VC funds to chase hypergrowth and reminds us of Scale Computing – the hyperconverged startup focusing on edge use cases. Scale is an HCI survivor that has built a sustainable business by sticking to its knitting and not risking everything in a frenzied dash for growth. That seems similar to StorONE’s approach.
StorONE is an individualistic storage software supplier. It’s not glamorous, nor hyper-energetic, nor screaming about its wares – just getting on with building out its all-in-one storage array software.
