New UK Start-Up StorageOS Offers to Build All-Flash Systems Using Commodity SSDs

StorageOS Ltd, based in London, UK, was started in May 2015.

The young company is looking for European based, tech-savvy investors for a first round of financial funding and currently hiring employees.

Executives

• Chris Brandon, co-founder and CEO, led the technical teams at Xsigo System and GreenBytes, both acquired by Oracle, as well as storage consulting teams at EMC and BT.

• Alex Chircop, co-ounder and CTO, was previously global head of storage platform engineering at Goldman Sachs and head of infrastructure platform engineering at Nomura International.
• Simon Croome, co-founder and VP of product management, is a specialist in agile delivery of Unix infrastructure and DevOps concepts and author of Gonzo, an open-source impact analysis tool for safely deploying Puppet changes in ITIL environments. He formerly led global engineering teams at Fidelity and Nomura, and web development at UBS in London.
• James Spurin, co-founder and VP of engineering, was previously the block storage product manager for Goldman Sachs and the technical lead for storage engineering at Nomura.
• Frank Back, VP of business development, has run two IT consulting businesses, exigo and tecsys IT-HAUS and worked at Sopra Banking, System Solutions and Bull Information Systems.

StorageOS wants to change how DevOps and SysAdmins use storage by giving them control of their own environment and securely opening the cloud to these communities. By providing enterprise functionality at a low cost entry point and being easier to manage, it enables customers to take advantage of storage on any platform while maintaining control of business requirements around availability, data mobility, performance, security, data residency compliance, and BC.

StorageOS is an enterprise functionality storage array that is integrated with VMWare, Docker, AWS, and Google Cloud and deployed on commodity hardware or VMs with a pay-as-you-go software model

It is designed to use a tiny memory and CPU footprint and installs on any server, VM or cloud instance with one core and 2GB of RAM.

It can use any type of disk (e.g. SSD, SAS or SATA) and will automatically detect the relative performance of each disk and place the most used data on the fastest disks.

A small amount of SSD capacity will increase performance as it will be automatically used for caching and/or consistency. SSD is mandatory if de-duple is enabled.

The platform is able to build out all-flash systems using commodity SSD devices.

After registration, the company provides tokens for a TB/month of presented data for free. This mean you can present 100GB/10 months or 1TB/month.

The customer only pays for the storage that is being presented or utilized by its applications on a month per month basis. This is implemented using a token system linked to its account. StorageOS delivers tokens in customer’s account when he buys them, and each month every node calculates the amount of presented storage and then deducts tokens to cover the utilization. These tokens can be bought from StorageOS directly, or from company’s reseller or cloud provider partners.

The product is currently running beta tests with plan to open beta in 1Q16.