COVID-19

Make Storage Ready for 2021

by

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.

Better storage

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.

Transparent pricing

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”.

StorONE makes storage ready

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.

The State of StorONE – Q3 2020 Update

by

A Message from the CEO

We are in the fourth quarter of a year like no other. The world around us has undergone profound changes over the past nine months. But, unfortunately, much remains stagnant. The ability to travel remains close to non-existent, and many employees are still working remotely. And, yet, many unknowns remain.

At StorONE, we have not only weathered the storm of 2020, but we have taken our talents to unprecedented heights. We are entering Q4 with strength, determination, and fortitude to lead the storage market.

Development

Throughout Q3, we continued to strengthen our technology. The StorONE Enterprise Storage Platform delivers three main advantages: unprecedented data reliability, complete flexibility for all the storage protocols/drive types, and exceptional performance efficiency.

StorONE fourth quarter

Data protection remains at the forefront as industries deal with relentless reliability threats. For this reason, StorONE dedicated Q3 to taking our already-unrivaled data reliability to industry-leading levels. Price-performance is of supreme importance, and therefore, our new release further extends our market lead. Additional information about StorONE’s third-quarter updates can be found in our Q3 Announcement Summary.

Sales

At the beginning of Q3, we announced that Chris Bowen had joined StorONE as VP of Sales. Amid the pandemic’s turmoil, this hire level was unusual, but what we have done since is unparalleled. In Q3, we continue to expand our salesforce, whose efforts span the United States and the world. Our investment in people is in stark contrast to so many other companies that are downsizing and minimizing expenses.

StorONE’s platform-based product line benefits organizations of all sizes. Since the beginning, we have always performed over 90% of installations without needing to be on-site. From day 1, we have provided remote operations support, something that has proven itself to be all the more beneficial in these uncertain times. With our new sales team in place, StorONE is experiencing an exponential increase in sales.

Marketing

One of our goals is to build an ecosystem around our product line. Last quarter, we announced a partnership with Intel. In this quarter, we have worked hard to extend our reach throughout the storage universe.

StorONE fourth quarter

During Q3, StorONE has continued building partnerships and alliances with distributors and resellers. Our partner-oriented marketing approach has been formalized with our new PartnerONE Reseller Program for resellers and service providers looking to simplify marketing strategies while helping customers overcome storage infrastructure challenges. Expect additional partnerships during Q4 and exciting news in Q1-2021.

Recognition

The Office of the Chief Scientist of Israel awarded us a large grant to recognize StorONE’s achievements in advancing research and development in technology. This Office represents Israel’s central authority on scientific research efforts. StorONE’s exceptionally high score on the Chief Scientist’s technology examination further illustrates the high value and level of innovation delivered by our technology.

COVID-19

Our technology was designed to offer peace of mind to our users, regardless of external stressors. While that has always been the case, the tumultuous period of the COVID-19 pandemic gave us another opportunity to study storage managers’ needs.

We recently conducted a global survey on how the pandemic affects data center operations. The results confirmed that IT professionals continue to address three key concerns: price, data protection, and remote operation. Our current solution certainly addresses these concerns while offering opportunities to ensure that a data center is adequately prepared for any challenges that could arise.

Yes, our technology is uniquely advantageous, but our foremost advantage resides in the StorONE team. I recognize, congratulate, and thank our company’s workforce, those who have been with us from the start, and those who have joined more recently, for their steadfast dedication and genuinely outstanding effort.

With our great salesforce, marketing team, support, and developers in place, StorONE is ready for Q4. If you would like to hear more about the company and our plans for this quarter, please contact me directly to set up a call.

I also want to take this opportunity to ask our StorONE extended family and friends to protect your health. COVID-19 has impacted so many friends and colleagues. Please know that our thoughts are with you as we pray for a better tomorrow.

With best wishes to all,

Gal Naor
Co-founder and CEO

Video: Improving Storage High Availability

by

High-Availability, or not having a single point of failure, is table stakes for any enterprise storage system, but how the system achieves high availability can directly impact cost and, more importantly, data integrity. Because of work from home requirements caused by pandemics, traditional HA may not be enough. Since data center access is extremely limited during these times, organizations are looking for more redundancy, so the storage infrastructure maintains operations for months, even if various hardware components have failed. 

In this LightBoard Video, we discuss the StorONE S1 Enterprise Storage Platform’s options for achieving extreme storage availability. To learn more, please visits StorONE’s recent article about high availability: https://www.storone.com/better-high-availability-during-pandemics/

Infographic – The Impact of COVID-19 on Data Centers

by

There has been a lot of research on the impact on COVID-19 but not much has focused on Data Center operations. StorONE’s landmark survey “How Has COVID-19 Impacted Your Data Center?” provides detailed insight as to how IT professionals are dealing with the “new normal” caused by COVID-19.

Survey Takeaways

Access to Data Centers is Severely Limited – The data center impact of work from home is that IT professionals are also working from home. While they can remotely administrate their data centers, sometimes physical access is needed to resolve hardware issues. Our survey shows that hardware failures force an alarming number of IT professionals to go to their data centers. Our vRAID and multi-level HA capabilities enable organizations to run for months with failed hardware without putting data at risk or suffering from a loss of performance.

Data Protection is Brittle – All IT Professionals realize that work from home and lights-out data centers require better data protection. Hardware failures may go on longer than expected, and uses are more fuel vulnerable to ransomware traps. According to our survey, most data centers don’t have the ability to change and improve their data protection quickly. The StorONE data protection suite enables organizations to meet evolving data protection challenges with just a few clicks.

Budgets Cuts! – Almost 80% of those surveyed indicated they were facing a budget cut of some time, yet nearly 67% reported they needed to continue to meet demands for increased capacity and performance. StorONE’s TRUprice enables customers to configure and price their systems upfront without endless negotiations.

Gal Naor, StorONE’s CEO‘s latest white paper, “10 Recommendations for Storage Managers to Prepare for Future Pandemics,” provides details on how to revise your storage infrastructure for the new normal. You can get the paper as well as our webinar about the survey results here.

Survey Shows Results of How COVID-19 Pandemic Has Negatively Affected Data Center Operations

by

NEW YORK – July 28, 2020 – With nearly 80 percent of respondents in a recent survey conducted by StorONE indicating that they have had cuts to their IT budgets, the effects of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic have resulted in a negative impact in organizations’ abilities to manage their storage infrastructures in order to ensure continued access to an increasingly remote workforce and to satisfy health protocols put in place to protect workers.

More than two-thirds of those questioned as part of the StorONE “How Has COVID-19 Impacted Your Data Center?” survey maintain some level of on-premises storage. Because of the pandemic, almost 40 percent of those organizations have had no or critically restricted access to their data centers to address storage hardware failures or increase data protection levels, such as improved drive redundancies or snapshot intervals. Reduced budgets mean that organizations will be unable to offer more performance and capacity to their users or will need to rely on better vendor pricing to supplement their needs.

Among the survey’s findings are:

  • 20 percent of organizations have not had any access to their data centers, meaning that any physical hardware failures have had to wait. Another 20 percent have had restricted access to only allow work done in critical instances. The remaining 60 percent have been able to maintain moderate access with established maintenance windows and limited workforces.
  • A third of have those been forced to go to the data center to replace drives despite health risks. 12.5 percent of respondents indicated that they have had to live with the risk of data loss due to access issues, while another 12.5 percent have leveraged hot spares for their failed drives.
  • 20 percent of organizations had restricted access to storage systems remotely during the pandemic, with 12 percent experiencing constrained remote administration capabilities due to hardware limitations. Another 12 percent had no remote administration during the pandemic with connections that either failed or were impractical.
  • 33.3 percent of respondents said they had to count on their backup system for improved data protection levels, with 20.8 percent not able to enable any improvements to protection levels and 16.7 percent unable to afford the performance impact required of increased data protection.
  • 16.7 percent of companies cut their IT budgets by more than 50 percent, with 45.8 percent cutting budgets between 10 and 25 percent. 4.2 percent cut budgets between 25 and 50 percent, 16.7 percent cut by as much as 10 percent and 16.7 percent reported no cuts to their IT budget due to Coronavirus.
  • To deal with reduced budgets, 40 percent of organizations are hoping for better pricing from their existing vendors, 30 percent will seek out other vendors that provide lower prices, and 30 percent will stand pat without increasing services to their users.

“While some organizations have been able to weather the storm of this unprecedented event, the negative impacts of COVID-19 on storage infrastructures are already being felt by a large majority of companies throughout the world,” said Gal Naor, StorONE co-founder, and CEO. “IT has long been expected to do more with less, but these survey results show that data is left unprotected and unavailable in many instances due to lack of access to physical hardware or severe budget cuts. Companies cannot afford to risk their data regardless of the current issues at hand. Organizations need to implement a solution that will allow them to take existing servers and storage to create a near-zero additional cost system complete with data-protection services. A storage system with these capabilities ensures mission-critical information is always available, immediately recoverable and remains durable during times of crisis.”

StorONE’s S1 Enterprise Storage Platform simplifies organizations’ storage infrastructures while providing a solution that meets all the software-defined storage objectives. StorONE’s suite of data protection services – S1:DirectWrite, S1:vRAID, S1:Snap and S1:Replicate – makes storage invincible by ensuring organizations can not only recover their information quickly but can also retain data indefinitely without impacting performance. This combination of services delivers unprecedented protection from data loss, no matter the threat.  

StorONE makes it easy to get an enterprise-class storage infrastructure up and running quickly, while at the same time reducing storage spend. Because the S1 Enterprise Storage Platform’s software is simple to install, StorONE engineers can guide customers through installation remotely via web conferencing services such as Skype, WebEx, and Zoom, to maintain a social distancing-compliant installation. Many customers can complete the installation themselves simply by following StorONE’s Quick Start Guide.

The survey is still available for input at https://www.storone.com/how-has-covid-19-impacted-your-data-center/. Naor and former storage analyst, now StorONE’s CMO George Crump are conducting a live webinar ”5 Steps to Seamless Storage Operations During a Pandemic” to provide the results of the survey and guidance on how to protect your storage infrastructure from future pandemics. You can register for the event at: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/5583/426935

All pre-registrants will receive an advance copy of Naor’s latest whitepaper “10 Recommendations for Storage Managers to Prepare for Future Pandemics”.

About StorONE

At StorONE, we focus on delivering the best results for our customers. Our mission is to make Storage Heroes by providing IT professionals with an Enterprise Storage Platform that transforms software-defined storage into a comprehensive storage infrastructure for all use cases. The platform’s portfolio ranges from All-Flash Arrays delivering 10K to 900K IOPS, Hybrid Arrays capable of supporting four tiers or more of storage and NAS/Backup solutions priced at less than a penny per GB. The platform is also protocol-independent, including fibre, iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and S3. All members of the Enterprise Storage Platform are available on-premises or in the cloud and come with the same enterprise-class feature set, driven by the same interface, which significantly reduces the cost of storage operations. 

Powering our Enterprise Storage Platform is our innovative technology, Total Resource Utilization (TRU). TRU, with over nine years of development investment and dozens of approved patents, enables maximum performance on minimal storage hardware while providing extensive data protection and flexibility for future growth.

StorONE founders are proven, successful entrepreneurs who boast over 50 patent awards. Top-tier industry luminaries and strategic investors back the company. The StorONE headquarters are in New York, with offices in Fort Worth, Texas, Tel Aviv, and Singapore. Additional information about StorONE is available at https://www.storone.com

Beat Ransomware with Better Primary Storage

by

Backup can’t beat ransomware. Instead, IT professionals need to beat ransomware with better primary storage. As the recent public disaster because of an alleged ransomware attack that Garmin is experiencing proves, bad actors are still at work even during the COVID-19 pandemic. Malware attacks are on the rise since March. Partly, the increase in attacks is because bad actors are also at home with more time to develop code, but the number of employees working from home is the primary cause of the increase. In either case, improving ransomware protection and response to an attack is more critical than ever.

Its Time To Re-Think Storage Infrastructure

Pandemics are a new kind of disaster, and IT needs to rethink how its storage infrastructure will respond. This Thursday, StorONE’s co-founder and CEO, Gal Naor, is joining me for a live webinar, “5 Steps to Seamless Storage Operations During a Pandemic.” If you pre-register before Wednesday, we will send you an advance copy of Gal’s latest white paper, “10 Recommendations for Storage Managers to Prepare for Future Pandemics“. During the webinar, we will provide new storage infrastructure best practices to implement during and before the next pandemic. We will also review the results of our landmark survey, “How has COVID-19 Impacted Your Data Center?” If you haven’t taken our survey yet, please take five minutes to fill it out so that we can include your experiences in our findings. A significant majority of those surveyed are finding their storage infrastructure unable to adapt to increasing threats like ransomware.

Backups Can’t Beat ransomware

Backup is classically a once a night operation. Recently, some backup software vendors have improved the technology to be able to execute more frequently, as much as every four hours. However, because of potential performance impacts, only critical applications get this special treatment, not the more vulnerable file systems. 

Beat Ransomware with Better Primary Storage not legacy backup
Backups Can’t Beat Ransomware

The problem is ransomware attacks occur at any time, often in the middle of the workday, triggered by a user accidentally clicking on a link. In these situations, multiple hours have passed since the last backup. The two most popular backup solutions make matters worse by storing the backup data, backup metadata, and backup configuration files on a Windows filesystem, the most attacked of all filesystems. 

Even if the organization is lucky and IT discovers a ransomware attack only a few hours after initiation, they are still in for a nightmarish ordeal as they try to restore hundreds of thousands of files while users wait “patiently.” Remember, users are no longer in the building now, so patiently waiting is even more than a stretch than it ever was before. 

Beat Ransomware with Better Primary Storage not legacy backup. You need rapid, ongoing protection and real-time recovery.

Legacy Snapshots Can’t Beat ransomware

A fallback position for most storage vendors is primary storage snapshots. For snapshots to be a useful deterrence against a malware attack, several capabilities need to be present and legacy snapshots don’t get the job done. First, the storage system needs to take an unlimited number of snapshots. Most legacy primary storage systems have a finite limit on the number of snapshots IT can take. Vendors often impose a snapshot limit, so the function doesn’t impact performance. The side effect is that the storage administrators can’t take snapshots frequently enough to protect from a ransomware attack. It also means that an administrator can’t retain a snapshot long enough to avoid a silent infiltration by the malware. A third challenge is that many storage systems store their snapshot data in the open, meaning that an external application can easily browse its way to it or, in the case of ransomware, stumble upon it. 

Legacy storage systems use snapshot technology that is decades old. Beat ransomware with better primary storage with modern snapshot capabilities that can capture data continually without impacting performance.

External Systems Are NOT the Answer

Several vendors are suggesting that you buy multiple systems to protect against ransomware attacks. These vendors are hardware vendors, so suggesting the solution is to buy more hardware shouldn’t come as a surprise. The problem with buying more hardware — other than the obvious additional cost — is that these systems are on the same network as the primary storage system and often have the exact same limitations as far as the number of snapshots and retention of snapshots. These vendors have added functionality to some of these systems to make it so nothing can delete them, not even IT (whose passwords may have been compromised). These dual-key systems make for interesting conversation, but they still don’t address the underlying issue. Most primary storage systems can’t take snapshots frequently enough and retain them long enough to provide adequate protection against a ransomware attack. 

External systems designed to cover the inadequacy of legacy primary storage fall short in ransomware defense while wasting IT budget. Beat ransomware with better primary storage that integrates protection and defends against even the most sophisticated attack.

Beat Ransomware with Efficient Snapshots

Beat Ransomware with Better Primary Storage that has efficient storage snapshots
Efficient, Limitless Snapshots Beat Ransomware

StorONE is efficient storage software that enables you to beat ransomware with efficient snapshots. Our snapshot technology allows IT to execute a snapshot as frequently as every three minutes. IT can retain those snapshots indefinitely—neither the frequency of snapshots nor the quantity the software is managing impact performance. We have customers maintaining thousands of snapshots on their systems. 

As I discussed in my blog, “Better High Availability During Pandemics,” you can replicate a primary StorONE system to a secondary system either synchronously on-premises or asynchronously to a disaster recovery site. These second and third systems can have unique snapshot schedules and also retain those snapshots indefinitely. 

Finally, our snapshots are not visible to any external application until they are specifically restored. That means that a ransomware application crawling its way through the file system can’t accidentally stumble on the snapshot because it is not there until you restore it. 

Our powerful snapshot technology not only provides the ultimate protection against ransomware, but they also can dramatically reduce your investment in the backup infrastructure. To learn more, please read my colleague Ittai Doron’s blog, “Use Snapshots to Reduce Backup Costs.” You can also register below to watch our on-demand webinar “Reduce Backup Costs with Better Primary Storage” below:

Download Program Overview

Learn More About the Hidden Cost of Dedupe

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.