StorONE: TRU Storage Software for $0.01/GB

StorONE Ltd. launched TRU (Total Resource Utilization) storage software that is poised to change the enterprise storage game.

It is the first company in the last decade to invest a six-year period of massive research and development, covered by more than 50 awarded and pending patents, prior to its first software release.

The software reduces the amount of hardware needed to achieve the performance and capacity results critical in the storage market.

With current drive technology having such high performance and density, it is no longer a challenge to implement any high performance or high capacity storage solution. Any integration project can achieve this with high performance drives or with a large amount of JBODs. Hardware has eliminated the bottlenecks of the past and continues to get faster and denser. But at what cost?

Henry Ford once said that if he asked his customers what they needed, they would say faster horses. In the same way, StorONE believes if today’s storage customers were asked what they need in order to get better performance, they would say faster hardware.

Vendors have convinced users that they need multiple copies, a multitude of drives and huge investments in hardware. The customer should ask why they need to buy a full storage solution just to achieve 250,000 IO/s when a few drives can achieve that.

Why is the price per IO/s $0.5-$1 as a single drive with 250,000 IO/s costs $500 (0.2 penny per IO/s)? 24 basic level SSDs should provide 1 million IO/s while providing the full capacity of the drives, so why are users not getting it and why are they still asking for faster hardware? The storage software stack has now become the problem. What StorONE has done is collapse the entire storage stack into a single seamless layer that has removed that final chokepoint.

“Using a GPU-based database, like SQream DB, requires extremely powerful storage to handle the large volumes of compute-intensive inquiries and analysis processes performed by our users in order to reach the database’s full potential,” said Ami Gal, SQream CEO. “While most storage systems require at least a half rack filled with drives and servers with high-speed connections like Infiniband just to meet our performance needs, StorONE gave us the best of both worlds by allowing us to choose between SSDs for performance and HDDs in the same storage solution, maximizing both performance and capacity.  Over the last year with StorONE, we now have a flexible and scalable system that relies on commodity hardware and enterprise-class storage for great performance and very high capacity – all with reasonable costs and very low footprint.”

StorONE gives the user the value of the resources they purchased. With enterprise-class TRU storage software, a customer’s hardware investment will match the rated IO/s, throughput and capacity of the drive regardless of whether it is SSD, NVMe or HDD. Furthermore, TRU storage software includes enterprise storage features such as unlimited snapshots; support for all storage protocols (block, file and object) on the same drives; and support for all drive types in the same server. There is no need to integrate multiple storage solutions when users can get it in a single software solution that runs at wire speed.

“Our vision is to reinvent storage software in such a way that it doesn’t just raise the storage efficiency bar, but also becomes the measure by which all other storage software is compared. Most storage systems and SDS vendors attempt to solve the storage performance chokepoint by adding more hardware, SSDs, NVMe, appliances or proprietary hardware while taking out or limiting storage features such as snapshots and data protection. Either methodology has diminishing marginal returns, adds complexity and high cost,” said Gal Naor, StorONE co-founder and CEO. “The problem is with the storage software stack and we have solved it.  While other vendors integrate, we innovate, allowing customers for the first time to benefit from reducing costs and complexity, while getting more enterprise-class features.”

TRU storage can be installed as a physical server or virtual appliance without the need to change existing the virtualization infrastructure. A single virtual appliance with low resources can achieve performance comparable to a mid-range storage solution with only 4 SSDs. 4 NVMe drives can achieve performance and latency as a high end solution, and a single HDD JBOD can provide 5GB/s with high capacity utilization.

“TRU Storage is a remarkable breakthrough in storage software efficiency,” said Marc Staimer, president, Dragon Slayer Consulting. “Storage software efficiency was an afterthought when memory, drives and IO were clearly the performance bottleneck. With Moore’s law visibly slowing, memory, drives and IO rapidly getting faster, the storage software stack has become the bottleneck.  StorONE is the first company to open that bottleneck.”

Pricing for TRU Storage is based on physical storage consumption through a simple subscription licensing plan. The price per gigabyte for a 150TB installation is $0.01, dropping to $0.002 (less than a penny) per gigabyte for installations of petabytes.

StorONE has a Early Adopters Program and on-site hardware of one petabyte is provided for free. The license includes all features, all storage protocols, any type of drives and performance for free. Organizations can change or move plans any time without penalty. For more information or to sign up for the Early Adopters Program.