A Message from the CEO
A question I get asked often is what the state of StorONE is, especially now. StorONE, like almost every other company in the world, is dealing in some way with the effects of the COVID-19. Chris Mellor, the editor at Blocks and File, articulated the concern well in his recent post “Canaries aflutter in the storage startup coalmine?” We’ve positioned both our team members and our financials to make it through the worldwide economic slowdown caused by the virus.
Since 2011 we have been cautious about how we spend money. We focus on our team, rather than plush offices and massive marketing budgets. Our investors knew that rewriting storage software from scratch was a long-term strategy, and they are very patient. The state of StorONE is secure and ready for what’s next. That said, like any other organization, we need to continue developing new customers while keeping current customers happy, but we do have the financial reserves to weather the COVID-19 pandemic.
Remote Ready
StorONE is a “remote-work ready” organization. All of our development efforts continue to move along unencumbered by various “shelter-in-place” restrictions. Just last week, we released our Q2-2020 update with critical new features. Our Q3-2020 release will also be on schedule with new capabilities that will further help our customers be Storage Heroes.
We are also fortunate that we designed our software for easy remote installation and support. Many of our customers install the software on their own, a rarity for enterprise storage solutions. We are seeing an ever-increasing level of interest from potential new customers looking to meet performance or capacity needs, improved data protection, and drive down storage costs.
IT professionals can also manage our software remotely. You can respond quickly over remote connections, without VPN requirements, from almost any platform, including web, tablet, or smartphone.
The state of StorONE enables us to be ready for the realities of social distancing.
A Solution Ready for the Next Economy
This pandemic will pass, economies will start back up, and people will return to work. Things will be different, though, and we may never return to “normal.” Reenergizing economies might be a long, slow journey, and organizations will pressure their IT teams to be much more frugal in how they invest in infrastructure. The state of StorONE enables us to provide the lowest cost storage infrastructures, without compromising on data reliability or performance.
IT needs to drive down storage costs today while creating long term value. At the same time, they need to meet the performance and capacity demands of the organization. The challenge facing IT is how to meet all of these conflicting requirements at the same time. Efficiency is the only way IT can meet the challenge.
Efficiency is at our core. Every day our development team is working hard to make our S1 Enterprise Storage Platform extract maximum performance from minimal hardware. Our development philosophy enables organizations to lower their upfront storage infrastructure investments and their long-term costs. It is not unusual for us to provide a five-year total cost of ownership price to a customer that is less than what they are paying for 18 months of maintenance.
Our Q2-2020 release’s S1:Tier will allow customers to reduce storage capacity while still meeting performance demands significantly. With S1:Tier a TLC/QLC storage system may be a better option than TLC-only All-Flash Arrays. See “Hybrid Instead of All-Flash” for more details. S1:Object will enable them to store petabytes of data cost-effectively. With each release, we will provide features to our S1 Enterprise Storage Platform that will further reduce costs, improve data protection, and increase performance.
The state of StorONE enables us to be ready for the next economy.
Building New Storage Infrastructure with Old Servers
Doing more with less will be an even more common mantra in this new economy than in the past. We are already seeing customers take advantage of our efficiency and re-purpose two-year-old servers as their primary storage servers. This creativity enables them to design storage infrastructure that delivers hundreds of thousands of IOPS at a fraction of the price of a brand-new storage system.
The State of StorONE is Solid and Ready for What’s Next
StorONE has the financial stability to make it through this crisis. Our teams haven’t lost a minute of productivity because of shelter-in-place policies. We are also ready to help organizations meet their storage challenges even though they will face new pressures to lower costs while meeting performance demands. The state of StorONE enables us to be ready to help you be a Storage Hero. If you want to learn more or speak with me directly, please contact us to set up a time.
