StorONE, a new SDS gem

Founded in 2011 by Gal Naor, who has founded Storwize in 2004 and sold it later in 2010 to IBM for $140 million, StorONE has made huge efforts to disrupt the market and the result is quite significant in term of approach and price, delivering the true value of the device users buy everyday. We had the privilege to meet the team and visit StorONE HQ in Tel-Aviv a few day ago with The IT Press Tour crew. And if you follow me, I wrote one of the very first article about StorONE in August 2016 when they made a surprising presence at VMworld 2016 in San Francisco.

Six years of development allowed by more than $20 million of VCs - Seagate, Giza and JGV - and private investors. Another remarkable element resides in the number of patents - 50 - granted or almost granted before the first version of the software. Wow there is some IP behind this. The company had invited to its board Edward Zander, former CEO of Motorola and COO and president at Sun Microsystems, and John W. Thompson, chairman of Microsoft and former CEO of Symantec, more recently at Virtual Instruments, and they have made private investments.

"Over provisioning" is a terrible world especially today with the gigantic volume of data people have to manage, if finally a user can deploy the only necessary infrastructure to sustain the business based on the real capabilities of its deployed hardware, it would be perfect.

So the idea is pretty simple on the paper but a real tough mission to solve. Gal explained us that its software named TRU for True Resource Utilization reduces all the layers complexity in the entire storage software stack into one single seamless layer that removes the chokepoint. The beauty of this come from the performance delivered and the price, less than $0.01/GB and globally less than $0.002/GB for multi-petabyte installations.

All features, all protocols and support of any drives - HDD, SSD or NVMe - are included and there is no option that finally reduce the value of the software.

Many vendors remove options from the proposal instead of doing discount of the full software and data services stack showing a limited value proposition to users. As a period of launch, the company has decided to invite potential users to its Early Access Program with a compelling proposal: to offer the hardware for 1PB fueled by TRU. The strategy is simple as finally you try the solution and you won't give it up. TRU is available as physical server or virtual appliance.

I offer to name this approach a multi-protocol SDS as TRU offers block, file and object access methods with unlimited snapshots with mixed drives in same servers.