TRUprice

The Case for Hard Drive Storage

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Even in production, the case for hard drive storage is a strong one, but several vendors are trying to make a case against its use. Even reputable analysts state that the days of hard disk drives (HDD) are numbered. IT professionals should consider these sources carefully with a high degree of skepticism.

There is a case for hard drive storage in secondary storage applications and primary storage. Indeed, in the face of flash media, HDDs have a different role to play than they did 15 years ago. Still, a change in their role does not mean that HDD storage is in any way obsolete or that IT professionals are doing their organization a disservice by leveraging HDDs. Quite the opposite, IT architects who can properly architect hard disk into primary and secondary storage give their organization a competitive advantage.

Case for Hard Drive Storage

The Price Advantage of HDD Storage

Although recently its reached a fever pitch, for almost ten years now, there have been claims that flash storage systems were within a year of reaching price parity with hard disk storage. Even with QLC, All-Flash Arrays are not much closer to price parity now than they were ten years ago. Flash-only vendors continue to make the purposeful mistake of assuming that hard disk technology will stand still and that current hard disk manufacturers will allow their products to stagnate. The opposite is happening. HDD vendors continue to invest in the technology, and HDDs remain the best per GB value in the data center for both primary and secondary storage.

The TRUE Price of a Hard Disk System

Right now, our TRUprice on a hybrid storage array is $199,000. It includes 1.2PB of hard disk capacity and 107TB of flash capacity. It also includes our StorONE Storage Engine, including vRAID, vSnap, and vReplicate. Our industry-leading price on TRUprice on a 1PB all-flash array is $499,000 with the same software and capabilities. That is $300,000 more for less capacity. And, because of StorONE’s Intelligent Hybrid Technology, many data centers will not notice a performance difference between the two. If you want an All-Flash Array, we have a solution; if you want a Hybrid Storage Array, we have a solution. We think the choice should be yours.

Besides noticing the price difference, notice that StorONE provides HDD and All-Flash systems (and Optane). How would the other vendors claiming the end of the HDD even know? They don’t sell HDDs!

The Hybrid Advantage of an HDD

Hybrid Storage automatically moves data from a fast tier to a slower tier. We use this technology in our AFA•next, which transparently moves older data from Optane to QLC. Optane acts as a shock absorber to the more delicate QLC tier. The same software powers our more traditional Hybrid Storage systems. Data is written to a TLC flash tier and then moves transparently to the HDD tier. Writes from the upper tier to the lower tier are sequential, setting the next tier up for excellent read performance.

The question that plagues legacy hybrid storage systems is, “what will performance look like if we access data, not on the flash tier?” It is a fair question. Obviously, in the Optane to QLC scenario, there is almost no noticeable performance difference. However, in hard disk storage, a legacy Hybrid Storage system doesn’t help mitigate the performance delta. They use too small of a hybrid tier, and they do very little to improve the hard disk tier’s performance.

StorONE’s Advanced Hybrid technology resolves these issues. First, StorONE’s Hybrid Storage uses a relatively large flash tier because of our price advantage. In the example above, the flash tier is 107TBs, and the flash capacity is expandable to Petabytes if need be.

Second, we improve the performance of hard disk drives. For most customers, the chances that operational data is not on the 107TBs of flash is minimal, but it can happen, and our engine is ready for it. StorONE spent its first seven years rewriting and flattening the storage stack. Our storage engine reads and writes data more quickly than any other system on the market. On our AFA•next, this means over one million IOPS from just four Optane drives. Our all-flash systems will deliver over one-million IOPS from only 12 NVMe flash drives.

Hard drives are not left out, however. Again, we own all the storage IO elements in our solution. In our Q4-2021 release, we improved hard disk performance by 5X! This performance improvement means that on the rare occasion when an application or user needs data from the HDD tier, it is delivered to them very quickly. The HDD tier is not very busy because of that large flash tier. In most cases, accessing data on the HDD tier, which may be months, if not years old, is not the priority, as is accessing data that is only minutes old. However, most users and applications won’t notice a performance difference because of these advanced storage management factors.

case for hard drive storage

StorONE’s Intelligent Hybrid Technology is also intelligent in how the recall occurs. If the platform senses mostly small block, transactional IO, it promotes the data to the flash tier as the application accesses it. However, if the accesses are large block, sequential, we deliver the data directly to the application. Once you get 20+ hard drives spinning, they can provide the bandwidth these applications need.

Maybe vendors that don’t provide at least an option for hard disk drives do so because they simply can’t figure out the intricate development work required to deliver automatic tiering. Worse, maybe the vendors use flash-only to hide a severe weakness in their code that hard disk technology will expose, like RAID rebuild performance.

The RAID Rebuild Advantage of HDD

Do hard disk drives have a RAID rebuild advantage? Yes, as most customers who need hard disk drives need many of them. If the RAID technology knows how to leverage this reality, then HDDs have an advantage. After a drive failure, the time to return to a protected state is likely the biggest concern of using hard drives. With 16TB and 18TB drives becoming commonplace, rebuild time will only worsen. If they support hard drives, legacy storage systems can take days or even weeks to bring a hard disk-based volume back to a protected state because of their outdated and inefficient software.

StorONE’s vRAID, however, can bring a volume residing on 16TB hard drives back to a protected state in less than two hours, not two days. As density increases on flash, we also see similar concerns about rebuild times with that media. We’ve heard multiple reports of double-digit hour rebuilds with 8TB flash drives. As 15 and 30TB flash drives enter the market, IT can expect multi-day rebuild times from flash. But, StorONE can rebuild flash volumes with 15.3TB flash drives in less than four minutes.

The Software is Key to Experiencing the Advantage of HDD

RAID rebuild times are not a uniquely Flash or HDD problem. They are a software problem. The storage software is the key to getting the full value from the media. That software should be written in a way that gives you a choice to leverage whatever technology enables you to meet both the budget and performance demands of your organization. The storage software should bring out the best from whatever media you choose and do its best to protect you from its weaknesses.

It is Your Data Center

All storage solutions have software as a critical component. If a vendor is forcing you to choose one media over another, it may be because using their software with another type of media exposes their code’s weakness. Even if you want an All-Flash Array (AFA), it makes sense to at least have the option to leverage another form of media in the future. It may be adding a hard disk drive tier for capacity, or it may even be adding an Optane tier for even more performance.

Remember, the choice of which media makes the most sense for your organization is yours, not your storage vendor.

Make Storage Ready for 2021

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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.

Better Storage Software Beats Dedupe

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IT Professionals are learning that when it comes to capacity efficiency, better storage software beats dedupe. The problem with deduplication is that it imposes a significant performance impact and may put data at risk. There are other ways to improve capacity efficiency that work across every workload and data type. Using better storage software enables them to receive better capacity efficiencies without compromising performance or data integrity. 

Register for our Virtual Whiteboard Session

In our last article, we discussed how efficient RAID can provide better capacity optimization than dedupe. This entry will look at other ways that better storage software beats dedupe. 

High per Drive Performance is better than Dedupe

Most flash drives on the market today can deliver hundreds of thousands of IOPS per drive. That means that six or seven of these drives in a system should provide 500,000 IOPS or more. However, most AFAs can’t surpass a couple of hundred thousand IOPS in an entire system with dozens of flash drives. Why? Their inefficient storage software is dragging along the deduplication algorithm like a boat anchor. To help increase drive count, most AFAs do not take advantage of the high-density flash drives on the market today. Instead, they force the customers to use lower capacity drives to increase drive count artificially. Then, customers must use deduplication to justify the lack of performance efficiency. While it is difficult to factor in the cost of low per drive performance, it is fair to say that it is significant.

At StorONE, we deliver more of the per drive performance potential than anyone else on the market. It is common for us to deliver 500,000+ IOPS with as few as six flash drives. That means less data center floor space, less power, and less cooling. Capacity is going down in price, while power and cooling are increasing. The place to save the most money is power and cooling. To learn more about the ROI of maximizing drive performance, check out our white paper “Reducing Storage Costs with Maximum Drive Performance.“

Snapshots are better than Dedupe

There are some cases where deduplication is better than snapshot technology. On the whole, however, snapshots can deliver more functionality. In fact, with our vSnap technology there is no performance impact. Our snapshot technology uses an advanced redirect on write algorithm. This algorithm provides the capability to sustain millions of snapshots with no effect on production performance. Remember, our performance commitment is hundreds of thousands of IOPS on a handful of flash drives, and we maintain that performance no matter how many snapshots are active. Our customers use vSnap in areas where they might benefit from deduplication, like virtual machine instances. They also use it for copy-data-management use cases, like providing capacity-efficient copies of databases to test, dev, and QA departments.

vSnap is so powerful that when combined with our cost-effective replication technology, vReplicate, you can replace the entire backup process with snapshots while still adhering to the “3-2-1” rule of backup.  It’s hard to calculate the savings of eliminating or reducing your dependency on backup, but as with performance, it is significant. To learn more about how to replace backups with snapshots and replication, check out our on-demand virtual whiteboard session “Using Replication for more than DR.“

Tiers are better than Dedupe

Despite AFA vendors’ repeated price parity claims with hard disk drives, the reality is that hard disks are significantly less expensive than flash drives. This reality is true even for StorONE. On our TRUprice configuration and pricing site, you’ll find that you can get a 500TB AFA for less than $300,000. This is a fantastic price considering its performance and features. By comparison, for $50,000 less ($249,000), you can double your capacity to get a 1.1PB Hybrid Array.

The hybrid configuration includes a generous flash area (92TBs) and 1PB of hard disk drive capacity. The flash area is so large that the chances of you not accessing performance-critical data from the flash tier are almost nonexistent. You can use the hard disk tier to automatically move less frequently accessed data from the expensive flash tier, to store data from workloads, and to store old snapshots for years. This is possible because we also automatically tier snapshots. Our vRAID technology provides similar benefits to hard disk technology as it does to flash, with no hot spares, and rapid rebuilds.

Conclusion

Deduplication is a technology whose time has passed. When we used to measure the cost of flash capacity in dollars per GB instead of cents, it made sense. It also made sense when drive density was relatively low, so maximizing drive capacity helped with the data center footprint. There are also future threats to the technology like application side encryption and legal unknowns as policies like GDPR take full effect. In the end, the net gain of deduplication is no longer worth the effort. Consequently, a storage software solution rewritten to deliver maximum resource efficiency is better than deduplication.

Better Hybrid Storage for VMware

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Instead of forcing customers to move to all-flash arrays (AFA), vendors need to provide better hybrid storage for VMware. The challenge that any virtual environment presents to a storage system is the workload variability of the virtual machine (VM) population.

VMware has proven itself to be a reliable way to get the maximum value out of physical servers. As a result, organizations are now virtualizing bare-metal workloads that are mission-critical. As IT increases the number of these VMs, the performance demands on the storage system increase significantly. This problem is generally solved by deploying an all-flash array.

The reality is, however, that the VMware environment doesn’t just support these performance demanding VMs. It also supports workloads with more mid-range performance needs and other workloads that are more capacity-based than IO-based. Even the performance demanding VMs don’t need all their data on high-performance storage at all times.

Hybrid Storage for VMware

In other words, the workload variety of VMs justifies a hybrid system more so than an all-flash array. Why then are AFAs so popular? The AFA vendors claim that IT can’t risk using a hybrid storage solution because the performance delta between a flash drive and a hard disk drive is so significant that users will notice the drop in performance.

They are right, there is a significant performance difference, and that’s why our flash-HDD hybrids are configured with more flash capacity than any of our competitors.

A Better Hybrid Solution

However, a better hybrid solution is our All-Flash Array.next (AFAn), which uses Intel Optane as the upper tier and Intel Quad Level Cells (QLC) Flash as the lower tier. It not only provides a better hybrid experience than traditional hard disk/flash hybrid storage, but it also offers better performance than every all-flash array on the market. Additionally, it delivers that performance at a lower price than those all-flash arrays. You can download our performance report here, and you can price your AFAn on TRUprice.

AFAn Better for VMware

The AFAn is ideal for the mixed workload, storage IO blender typical of VMware environments. All writes go to the Optane tier, which delivers high IOPS and sub-half-second latency. The system also reads the most active data from that tier. AFAn uses Optane as storage, not as a cache, which means we have drive redundancy to protect from drive failure. To learn more about caching and tiering, check out Chris Evans’ blog “Caching vs. Tiering.“

Hybrid Storage for VMware

Powered by Optane, those newly virtualized mission-critical workloads now get the extreme performance of Optane. This means the AFAn handily outperforms more expensive AFAs. For customers, this means they can virtualize more mission-critical workloads on fewer physical servers, driving down the total ROI of their VMware environment.

The advantage of using Optane as a storage tier provides time. Data can become less ephemeral and be moved to the QLC flash tier sequentially. QLC flash is less durable than Triple Level Cells (TLC) flash but is also less expensive. Sequentially writing to QLC increases its durability by 10X. The other advantage of sequentially writing to QLC is it improves the already excellent read IO. As a result, applications and users will notice no performance impact when accessing older data. In other words, AFAn solves the Hybrid performance problem.

Being powered by QLC, means that the AFAn is ideal for supporting all VM workloads. Less performance-critical VMs’ data will tier down to QLC but still enjoy a sequentially written QLC tier’s excellent access performance. With 15.8TB QLC drives commonplace and 30TB QLC drives less than six months away, AFAn customers will be able to meet all their capacity requirements using almost no rack space.

The AFAn comes with all the capabilities of the StorONE Enterprise Storage Platform. The AFAn’s vRAID delivers RAID rebuild times of less than one minute, can execute and manage millions of snapshots, and can replicate synchronously and asynchronously to dissimilar hardware. Just because you have an Optane powered AFAn in production doesn’t mean you also have to have one at the DR site.

Most importantly, an AFAn supports more than VMware. Being powered by the Enterprise Storage Platform, means that the AFAn supports block protocols like fiber channel, iSCSI, NVMe-oF and file protocols like NFS, SMB and S3/Object. After using AFAn to address all their VMware challenges, customers can extend the solution to manage bare-metal workloads like Oracle and MS-SQL as well as traditional NAS workloads. They can even address next-generation needs like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics.

To learn more about using AFAn on VMware, watch our on-demand webinar “How to Make Hybrid Storage Cool for VMware.“

The State of StorONE – Q3 Update

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A Message from the CEO

At the time of our previous quarterly update in April, the world was filled with question marks. StorONE braced itself for the unknown while continuing to work diligently to push technological barriers, to innovate, and to grow our team. As we enter the 3rd quarter of 2020, I am pleased to report that StorONE not only weathered the unique challenges of the second quarter, but saw Q2 prove to be one of the company’s most transformative quarters ever. 

Intel Partnership

One of the most exciting initiatives of Q2, which has received tremendous accolades from leading analysts, editors of storage magazines, and many bloggers, is our strategic partnership with Intel® to bring a new product, “All Flash Array.Next” (AFAn), to the enterprise storage market. AFAn combines Intel® hardware (servers and disks) and StorONE software. StorONE has taken Intel® Optane™ advanced drives from its niche position — used thus far as either a metadata solution or to read cache — to the mainstream enterprise storage market. StorONE’s innovative software enables maximum utilization of Intel® Optane™. 

AFAn’s unique capabilities include: 

  • The ability to achieve extremely high performance with very few drives, especially with 300,000 write IOPS with less 1ms latency. Competitor solutions require many drives to achieve the same level of performance.
  • The AFAn solution integrates high-speed, complete data protection and retention without any performance degradation. AFAn writes directly to solid state media taking full advantage of the exceptional write performance of Intel® Optane™. StorONE’s software provides the missing link by making this advantage visible and revealing its high value to customers. Our competitors must write to memory first, which makes Intel’s Optane™ much more expensive while adding technical complications.
  • StorONE provides a consolidated solution, and all storage protocols (block – FC, iSCSI, FILE – NFS, SMB, and Object) are available on the AFAn without any configuration changes and at no additional cost.
  • AFAn is sold at the absolute lowest price on the market and simplifies storage operations by deploying fewer components. We are proud to cooperate with Intel bringing the next generation of All Flash Array to consumers worldwide. You can learn more about AFAn here.

TRUprice

During Q2, StorONE brought company transparency to a whole new level by publishing storage pricing — including the cost of hardware and software — so clients other interested parties could see the exact cost of our solution. We developed the “TRUprice” calculator tool to configure a complete storage solution in just four clicks. This calculator represents what StorONE is at its core – a company that sets the bar for honesty and truth, a company whose very DNA is results-focused, without the fluff. 

Here’s my call to action to our competitors that they also publish pricing data, and by so doing, join us in transforming the storage industry. 

Development

During Q2, we published a new version of our S1:Enterprise Platform, which includes many new features, including those requested by customers. 

These new features continue to focus on our advantages in three main areas: 

  1. Data protection with new capabilities 
  2. High-performance with minimal hardware 
  3. Flexibility of multiple protocols, delivering enterprise services, and more. 

I invite you to watch for our next announcement in September. 

Sales

After tremendous growth in sales over the first two quarters of 2020, we are thrilled to announce that Chris Bowen joined StorONE as the VP of Sales. Chris’ vast experience in the world of tech sales, and primarily in the field of storage, makes him a wonderful addition to our team. We look forward to seeing StorONE grow under his expertise. 

Distribution

StorONE continues its exponential growth by working with distributors and partner channels. StorONE offers resellers significant advantages as we provide a complete software for their customers’ storage needs. With StorONE, distributors do not need to work with multiple vendors. Working with us enables them to rely on a single source for inventory, presentations, pricing, and of course, support. Partners can thus increase the number of products sold in other fields and provide additional solutions for their customers. Our new reseller program makes partnering with StorONE the obvious choice. 

COVID-19

As the world remains in disarray due to the impact of COVID-19, we acknowledge the continued need for companies to be mindful of costs allocated for storage purchases and operations. From its inception, StorONE’s system was developed to be the most efficient system in the storage industry. We achieve unique storage solution, both in terms of performance and capacity. Our minimal hardware storage solution stands as the optimal way to deliver the best price to our customers. We also respect companies’ requirements for payment installments and we offer payments of CapEx and OPEX. Recently, I wrote an article entitled, “Preparing Your Data Center for Pandemics – Lessons Learned from COVID-19”. Now is the time to determine if your data center is using efficiency to ready itself to weather future storms. The article is available to anyone that pre-registers for our live webinar “5 Steps to Seamless Storage Operations During a Pandemic”

The Team

Of StorONE’s many unique capabilities, its first and foremost are our people. I recognize and thank the entire company for their extraordinary steadfastness during the challenges of Q2. And, I thank our customers for their continued support and trust in our innovative approach to storage utilization. StorONE is ready for Q3. 

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. 

Wishing you continued health, 

Gal Naor 

Co-founder and CEO 

Press Release: StorONE Delivers Intel® Optane™ SSD Solutions for Enterprise Storage

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All-Flash Array.next combines Intel® Optane™ SSDs and Intel® QLC 3D NAND Storage Tiers

NEW YORK – June 23, 2020 – StorONE today announced the All-Flash Array.next (AFAn), which uses Intel® Optane™ Technology as a storage tier, not as a cache. It integrates Intel® QLC 3D NAND SSDs for cost effective, high capacity, moving data between the two storage tiers as it ages. StorONE’s S1:AFAn is the highest-performing, most cost effective storage system on the market today. Powered by StorONE’s S1 storage software it is designed for traditional enterprise data centers. 

The AFAn represents a new breed of storage solutions that are a logical upgrade to aging All-Flash Array (AFA). The AFAn supports mainstream workloads like VMware, Hyper-V, Oracle and MS-SQL, while at the same time providing the extreme performance required of applications such as analytics and artificial intelligence. The result is true storage consolidation at a price every data center can afford.

“We are pleased with StorONE’s use of Intel® Optane™ SSDs in their new S1:AFAn product offering. This will bring new and exciting enterprise storage services to data centers of all sizes” said Chris Tobias, GM, Optane Solutions Division of Intel.

A key ingredient of the S1:AFAn is StorONE’s S1 Enterprise Storage Platform, an efficient storage software solution that is able to extract the full performance of Intel® Optane™ SSDs and offset costs by automatically tiering to lower cost Intel® QLC 3D NAND SSDs, without read performance penalty. S1 provides complete data protection and data services without impacting performance. 

“The S1:AFAn represents the next generation of enterprise storage” said StorONE’s CEO Gal Naor. “S1:AFAn enables customers to start with as little as 30TBs of capacity, a configuration capable of delivering over 1 million IOPS and then grow performance and capacity independently as organizations’ needs demand. We’ve added the AFAn configuration option to our transparent pricing site, TRUprice. Customers can use TRUprice to configure and price an AFAn and see, in realtime, that the S1:AFAn solution costs less than competitors’ AFAs.

CompuTech International (CTI) is the distributor of StorONE’s S1:AFAn. 

“CTI is pleased to partner with Intel and StorONE to help bring the AFAn to market. AFAs are a decade old technology that should now be considered obsolete. The AFAn brings Intel’s revolutionary Intel® Optane™ Technology to a whole new market, the traditional enterprise data center. With the AFAn, customers can meet all of their performance demands at a price lower than legacy AFAs,” said Eyal Shachi, CTI CEO. 

Thanks to StorONE’s S1 software, the AFA automatically tiers data from the Intel® Optane™ SSD tier to an Intel®QLC 3D NAND SSD storage tier. Using Intel® Optane™ SSD as a tier of storage and not a cache, enterprise customers enjoy the full write performance of Intel® Optane™ SSDs as well as its excellent read performance. StorONE’s S1:Tier feature is also optimized for Intel® QLC drives to extend their durability and life. When the S1:Tier technology demotes older data from the Intel® Optane SSD tier, it writes it to QLC in large sequential blocks. Since the Intel® QLC 3D NAND SSD tier can provide read performance at near- Intel® Optane SSD performance levels, there is no need to promote data unless the application modifies it. These optimizations enable organizations to expect long life from the Intel® QLC 3D NAND SSD tier and see no performance impact when reading from it.

“The S1:AFAn is more than just old software trying to take advantage of new hardware,” said George Crump, Chief Marketing Officer at StorONE. “StorONE’s S1 Enterprise Storage Platform was written from the ground up to take advantage of technologies like Intel® Optane™ Technology. We are delivering specific optimizations in how we write data to the Intel® Optane™ Technology tier, as well as how we manage the QLC tier. Our software is carefully crafted to make sure customers receive full performance and full data integrity at a price they can afford.” 

The StorONE AFAn using Intel® Optane™ Technology is shipping July 6th with StorONE taking pre-orders immediately. Customers and resellers can find additional information about the S1:AFAn solution at: https://www.storone.com/product/s1-AFAn. 

Intel® and StorONE will be hosting a joint webinar about the solution on Tuesday June 30th at 1:00 PM ET and 10:00 AM PT. Registration is available here:

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 TX, Tel Aviv, and Singapore. Additional information about StorONE is available at https://www.storone.com

About Intel®

Intel® (Nasdaq: INTC) is an industry leader, creating world-changing technology that enables global progress and enriches lives. Inspired by Moore’s Law, we continuously work to advance the design and manufacturing of semiconductors to help address our customers’ greatest challenges. By embedding intelligence in the cloud, network, edge and every kind of computing device, we unleash the potential of data to transform business and society for the better. To learn more about Intel’s innovations, go to newsroom.intel.com and intel.com.

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