Any company that can persuade IT heavyweights such as John Thompson and Ed Zander to be on the board of directors is a company with which to be reckoned.
StorONE, which last week introduced for early adopters a new type of storage software called TRU (for Total Resource Utilization), is that company.
Thompson, chairman of Microsoft, a former CEO of Symantec and Virtual Instruments and longtime IBM executive, and Zander, former President of Sun Microsystems and CEO of Motorola, both know their ways around the IT business and recognize quality products when they see them. This speaks volumes for 6-year-old, New York City-based StorOne.
You don’t have to pull out and replace any legacy hardware to run StorONE’s software. It runs on anything and everything, CEO and founder Gal Naor told eWEEK. “You can mix and match any kind of drive with our software; hard drives, solid-state drives, NVVE (non-volatile memory express)—anything. We enable the reuse of everything,” Naor said.
Six Years of Development Went into the Product
The company invested six years of research and development into TRU, using more than 50 awarded and pending patents, prior to its first release on Nov. 21.
StorONE’s TRU storage software includes enterprise storage features such as unlimited snapshots; support for all storage protocols (block, file and object) on the same drives; and support for all drive types in the same server. There is no need to integrate multiple storage solutions when users can get it in a single software solution that runs at wire speed, Naor said.
“Our idea is to reinvent storage software in such a way that it doesn’t just raise the storage efficiency bar but also becomes the measure by which all other storage software is compared,” Naor said. “Most storage systems and SDS vendors attempt to solve the storage performance chokepoint by adding more hardware, SSDs, NVMe, appliances or proprietary hardware while taking out or limiting storage features such as snapshots and data protection. Either methodology has diminishing marginal returns, adds complexity and high cost.
“The problem is with the storage software stack, and we have solved it. While other vendors integrate, we innovate, allowing customers for the first time to benefit from reducing costs and complexity, while getting more enterprise-class features.”
No Changes to Existing Infrastructure Needed
TRU storage can be installed as a physical server or virtual appliance without the need to change existing the virtualization infrastructure. A single virtual appliance with low resources can achieve performance comparable to a midrange storage solution with only four SSDs. Four NVMe drives can achieve performance and latency as a high-end solution; a single HDD JBOD can provide 5GBps with high capacity utilization, Naor said.
Pricing for TRU Storage is based on physical storage consumption through a simple subscription licensing plan. The price per GB for a 150TB installation is as low as 1 cent, dropping to $0.002 (less than a penny) per GB for installations of petabytes. StorONE has a robust Early Adopters Program and on-site hardware of one petabyte is provided for free.
The license includes all features, all storage protocols, any type of drives and performance for free. Organizations can change or move plans any time without penalty, Naor said.
For more information or to sign up for the Early Adopters Program, go here.
