Reduce Storage Costs and Risks

The primary objective of our Q2-2020 update is to reduce storage costs and risks. We’ve added two significant features that enable organizations to lower the cost of their storage infrastructure. We’ve also added two critical enhancements that better protect data both long term and during a disaster. StorONE’s Q2-2020 release is available to help you reduce storage costs and risks today.

Capabilities to Reduce Storage Costs and Risks

Thanks to its innate efficiency, our StorONE S1 Storage Platform is a leader in providing high-performance, low-cost storage infrastructure. Our ability to run on hardware with modest CPU power and RAM means storage server (controller) costs are low. Our ability to extract maximum performance from each drive in our system means that you don’t buy more drives then your capacity requirements demand. Unlike temporary price cuts, our savings are permanent.

S1:Tier

In our Q2-2020 update, we are adding S1:Tier. It is our unique tiering feature that enables organizations to move data from one type of storage to another automatically. Storage administrators easily set thresholds for each volume, and S1 automatically responds to those settings. Unlike other tiering solutions from other vendors, S1:Tier can tier across multiple tiers of storage.

For example, a storage administrator can set a policy to tier data from high-performance flash to high capacity QLC flash. They can then set a policy to tier to a third-tier like hard disk drives. The concept of using QLC SSDs as a second-tier is especially interesting. It provides the cost savings opportunity of legacy hybrid systems that used HDD as its second-tier. Using QLC as the second tier, however, means that a “tier-miss” won’t lead to a dramatic loss in performance. In fact, in most cases, read-performance should be identical from each tier. In other words, you can enjoy the cost savings of hybrid storage without the drawbacks.

S1:Object

Another capability with the potential to both reduce storage costs and risks is our new S1:Object capability. Our Enterprise Storage Platform currently provides block (iSCSI, Fibre) and file (NFS, SMB). This support covers the majority of use cases data centers need. Adding object storage support enables those organizations to store massive amounts of data, safely, and cost-effectively. Savings also come from having a single interface to provide all of these various use cases.

A popular use case for S1:Object is to provide our customers with a way to get started with object storage. Working with a stand-alone object storage vendor means committing to 75TBs of capacity on day one. With our solution, customers can create a 75GB pool of storage to start with their initial testing. They can then gradually scale the pool to dozens of petabytes as the application moves into production.

New Protection Features to Reduce Storage Costs and Risks

Many vendors focus too much on performance. The most critical responsibility, however, of storage infrastructure is to guarantee data integrity and protect data from disaster. Our S1 Enterprise Storage Platform already provides significant capabilities that enable organizations to reduce storage risks and costs. Our DirectWrite feature eliminates the need for a RAM cache or the use of NVDIMMs. A cacheless design means when our software acknowledges a write, you can be sure we’ve safely stored it on media. Our vRAID feature protects you from data loss if one or multiple drives fail. Finally, our snapshot feature enables you to roll back in time to recover a corrupted volume. Snapshots provide rapid recovery from problems caused by human error or ransomware attacks. As this article on Storage Switzerland points out, all Snapshots features are not created equal. Our S1:Snap has unique capabilities unavailable from our competitors.

Again, the goal of our Q2-2020 release to reduce storage costs and risks. Each new feature in this update improves data integrity and resiliency while at the same time reducing overall storage costs.

S1:Snap

S1:Snap, as I mentioned above, is not a new feature for us. It does, however, benefit from being a part of the Enterprise Storage Platform. Thanks to S1:Tier, we can now tier old snapshot data from high-cost storage to lower-cost storage. This combination can reduce storage costs and risk within the same feature. With S1:Snap customers can retain snapshots for years. Before S1:Tier, though, the snapshot data remained on the same class of storage assigned to the volume. The combination of S1:Snap with S1:Tier means that old snapshot data, can now move to a tier of less expensive storage. Moving old snapshot data off of more expensive storage means that customers can enjoy long data retention cycles without paying a premium to keep them.

S1:Replicate

One of the most important ways to reduce storage costs and risks is to make sure your data survives a disaster. StorONE now provides asynchronous, near-synchronous, and synchronous data replication. Customers can use this feature to protect against an internal data center rack failure or an entire data center failure. S1:Replicate meets the objective of our Q2-2020 release to reduce storage costs and risks by enabling replication to different system configurations.

With S1:Replicate, the primary site can, for example, be all-flash based and the DR site can be a hybrid system with a small flash tier. During a disaster, the storage administrator can promote the secondary system in the DR site. The flash tier in the S1 Platform at the DR site will make sure that users maintain acceptable performance. If IT determines that operations will run at the DR site for an extended period, they can add more flash to the primary tier. Our vRAID feature will automatically integrate it into the current volume and balance data across it.

More to Come

Another essential element of this release is its name. StorONE is leaving the version 1, version 2, version 3 release concept in the past. Going forward, we are committing to a quarterly release schedule. Each quarter we will have two to three features of significance for our customers to leverage. It’s all part of our quest to help you be a Storage Hero.

Learn More to Reduce Storage Costs and Risks:

Join my colleague George Crump, StorONE’s Chief Marketing Officer and I for a on-demand webinar. Register for “Reduce Storage Costs and Risks with StorONE’s S1 Enterprise Storage Platform,” here. During the webinar, we discuss how these new features can help you lower storage costs and increase data integrity. The webinar also features a live demonstration of the new features in our Q2-2020 release.