StorONE strengthens its positions

StorONE, an innovator in storage software, joined the recent IT Press Tour in Israel. We had the opportunity to meet again the company we met globally 4 times and we realized the road to maturity and profitability made by the team and led by its CEO and founder Gal Naor. Last time we met StorONE was in June 2019 so progress were significants.

The new positioning of the company is around the storage hypervisor strategy what they call Virtual Storage Container (VSC) in fact an advanced universal storage controller based on pure software.

The main idea for the company and Gal Naor since the inception relies on 3 key elements: software only, maximize the performance delivered from the media and especially flash-based units at the right cost. In other words it's all about efficiency with the mission of the company to simplify storage management.

To address this market need and position its storage software, the team has introduced the VSC concept, coupling a scalable resilient service instance, storage volumes and access methods. The image below shows 3 volumes exposed with different protocols running and instantiated on same controller machine. Each VSC is independent providing its own data services with vRAID, vSnap, vReplicate, tiering and also performance requirements and settings. A volume could be full HDD, full flash or hybrid with implicit automatic tiering in that case.

StorONE for several years created and developed its own data services. The key element is the cacheless architecture that avoids any potential data integrity challenge with all write operations stored on persistent media. The engineering group has designed a new RAID and erasure coding technique and also some advanced data placement models. The gain is immediate with very fast rebuilds, for instance a SSD is recovered in less than 5 minutes.

The company leverages its snapshot mechanism to provide a proven ransomware protection with delta time of 60 seconds, incremental mode and very space efficient. But more globally the solution doesn't target any specific use cases as it is positioned as a universal solution replacing specific, dedicated or proprietary approaches. In other words, it works for everything but the config has to be chosen carefully to optimize and maximize the result.

Now as the business in US has really taken off, the company wishes to accelerate in Europe with a strong channel strategy representing a serious competitor against usual storage array suspects.