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StorOne brings leasing for high-performance multiprotocol flash storage
To make a name for itself in the SME storage market, startup StorOne intends to innovate in technology and its economic approach, with a subscription model for storage
Startup StorOne, so far known for its Total Resources Utilisation (TRU) software-defined storage, plans to offer storage-as-a-service. but with flash storage hardware located at customer premises rather than in the cloud.
“With a tariff of $799 per month for 15TB of capacity, and all functionality included, it’s the best value offer in the storage market. And what’s more, we will bring down subscription prices as prices come down in the market,” said Gal Naor, CEO of StorOne.
This leasing-style arrangement can be for as little as a month, with a deposit of three months of subscription. At the end of a 60-month period the hardware transfers to the client.
According to Naor, the fact StorOne is a newcomer to the market will work in its favour when dealing with customers accustomed to dealing with the big names in storage.
“For us, it’s good to hit the market with innovations in technology and the commercial model,” said Naor
An early target for StorOne are the small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that would otherwise look at hyper-converged infrastructure and have no problem with innovative solutions.
Capacity increments of 15TB were chosen, said Naor, because Pure Storage sold configurations of 10TB and Nutanix offered solutions of 20TB.
Performance close to raw disk
StorOne comes in 2U nodes that can hold up to 360TB of flash with performance in the million IOPS range. SSDs can be SAS or NVMe connected, with Ethernet or Fibre Channel out to hosts.
“In our competitors’ products, global performance only represents about 20% of the total speed of the disks contained. In our solutions, performance attains 90% of its potential, thanks to our TRU S1 operating system that runs on X86 controllers,” said Naor.
TRU S1 is the outcome of eight years of development and 50 technology patents. It is claimed by StorOne to have achieved massive optimisation, can make do with 64GB of RAM and doesn’t have need for a Raid controller to ensure data security.
Naor said StorOne had demoed 24 SAS-connected flash drives on an x86 storage server that provides 500,000 read IOPS, 180,000 write IOPS, latency of less than 0.2ms (milliseconds) and throughput of 10Gbps read and 5Gbps write.
File, block and S3 object access
TRU S1 allows NAS, SAN and S3 object storage access.
“We want to offer all storage options to customers. These are appliances that can offer high-speed access to storage, constitute a data repository protected by erasure coding, store virtual machine images, or provide real data for test and dev,” said Naor, who emphasised that all services are executable simultaneously and manageable from a browser interface.
Among the key functionality in TRU is a system of rewriteable snapshots. As in backup software, it’s possible to nest successive versions of your data to minimise space used and to allow numerous points in time to roll back to.
Read more about SME storage
- Small companies can often take advantage of public cloud storage offerings to supplement or replace on-premise infrastructure. We look at key options in file, block and object storage.
- The rise of hyper-converged infrastructure – with compute, storage and networks in one box – seems ideal for SMEs, but is it always a better idea than traditional IT architecture?
