The State of StorONE: An update from our CEO, Gal Naor
StorONE makes storage ready for 2021 and beyond. This past year was one like no other. With a collective sigh of relief and hope for a better tomorrow, we recognize the good that came from 2020. Thanks to our advanced planning and fortitude, 2020 was StorONE’s best year yet.
The storage hardware advancements that defined the past decade will continue, and 2021 promises more innovation than we ever thought possible. StorONE takes full advantage of these innovations to solve any storage challenge. Our Storage Engine simplifies the entire storage infrastructure, delivers unrivaled data protection, and eliminates data migration, all while significantly lowering storage TCO.
Here are some examples of what we did in 2020 to revolutionize the storage industry:
People: In 2020, just a bit before COVID took over our lives, we began hiring a marketing team. George Crump, StorONE’s CMO, and his entire team have transformed the company. Then, in the middle of the pandemic, StorONE made an unprecedented move to invest in ourselves instead of cutting back. We hired Chris Bowen as VP of Sales in Q3 and sales professionals from around the world during Q3 and Q4. Not only did our sales increase dramatically, but Q4 was, in short, a game-changer for the company.
Technology: During Q4, we deployed a vital feature: auto-tiering. We believe that auto-tiering represents the future of storage. Tiering saves money without impacting performance. For example, our All-Flash Array.next has a tier of Intel Optane and a tier of quad-level cell (QLC) flash. The upper tier of Optane can sustain over 1 million read IOPS, and 300K sustained write IOPS (most all-flash vendors never report a write IOPS result). You can access our Intel Optane powered AFAn performance report here.
Our tiering is transparent to both the administrators and users. Our system automatically configures tiering intervals. Most importantly, our tiering is seamless and has virtually no impact on latency, even during the worst conditions.
StorONE offers two auto-tiering configurations:
1. SSD (upper) and HDD (lower) deliver significant cost savings versus all-flash arrays.
2. Optane (upper) and QLC (lower) – deliver affordable Optane performance without feature compromise.
VARs: We refer to resellers of our products as Partners. We are as interested in their success as we are in ours. During Q4, we launched PartnerONE, StorONE’s program for our partners to simplify their sales strategies. We built our innovative program to provide them with the tools needed to overcome any customer storage infrastructure challenge and showcase StorONE’s competitive advantage. As StorONE’s products are hardware agnostic, PartnerONE members can use hardware from the server vendors of their choice. They also have exclusive access to S1:Cloud “as a service” pricing model and can eliminate the cloud as competition.
I am confident that the storage industry will benefit from an increase in strategic partnerships between vendors, resellers, hardware manufacturers, and distributors.
Transparency: Simply put, transparency is in our DNA. A lack of transparent pricing and performance results plagues the storage industry. Vendors have created a shell game, where the customer never knows if they are getting the best price or how their system performs versus the rest of the industry. In 2020, StorONE decided that this situation had to end. Users demand honesty. The sector deserves transparency.
In 2020 we launched our message of transparency in two realms – pricing and performance. In Q2 of 2020, we announced our revolutionary TRUprice site. TRUprice is the first and only storage configuration tool that provides accurate pricing for any storage solution, using any hardware without requiring the individual to sign up and leave details. Since May, TRUprice has become the number one destination for IT professionals and analysts to get storage pricing. Many articles have been written lauding our site as the place to go.
In 2020 Q4, we continued our push for transparency by publishing the Evaluator Group’s independent testing of StorONE’s Intel Optane powered, All-Flash Array.next (AFAn). The report details the consulting firm’s extensive testing of StorONE’s AFAn solution and validates its claim as a $-per-IOPS leader. The test system delivered over 1 million non-cached IOPS, and it is available on our TRUprice website for less than $50,000!
Having one company test our performance wasn’t enough. We decided to have Storage Review independently test our AFAn as well, and they concur with Evaluator Group and brilliantly explain how our company revolutionizes the storage industry:
“The StorONE All-Flash array takes advantage of some of the best storage technologies out there from Intel, but the secret sauce is in the software. The company’s S1 Enterprise Storage Platform software helps to create a software-defined environment where users can take full advantage of Optane and QLC storage. The easy-to-use software is built around the elimination of bottlenecks and maximizing the potential performance. StorONE puts a large emphasis on flexibility with capacity-based licensing fees that have pricing reflective of the customer’s system size or they can examine your needs and recommended a system based on them”.
We accomplished our goals! By having independent testing done for our products, we can confidently assure our customers that they are indeed receiving the best storage solution. At the same time, I continue to call on my colleagues in the industry to publish their results, too. There are few things needed more now than transparency.
COVID-19: I debated writing about COVID again, but I would be remiss to ignore the pandemic as it continues to ravage the world. I hope the end is near. I hope the vaccine will soon become available to everyone. In the meantime, please continue to keep your guard up. I believe that the pre-COVID and post-COVID worlds won’t be as dissimilar as some claim, but we need to get there first. Let’s work together for a better tomorrow.
Thank you: To my amazing team, thank you! Thank you for working so hard during a most challenging year. Whether you were dealing with health struggles, kids being home from school, or the colossal stress of the world combusting around us, as a company, we managed to juggle all the balls at once. Your perseverance and dedication make StorONE the kind of company the industry and customers need. At StorONE, we say, “Think Results.” The results of 2020 are clear: we took the storage industry by storm and have paved the way to lead the storage industry by example: delivering BETTER storage, TRANSPARENT pricing and performance, and the BEST results.
If you would like to hear more about the company and our plans for 2021, please contact me to set up a call.
