IT Press Tour 67: Storware

We had the opportunity to meet Storware during the recent 67th edition of The IT Press Tour held last week in Sofia, Bulgaria.Paweł Mączka, CEO, Storware, structured the presentation as a “ghost story about data security,” told through three chapters, the Ghost of Past (2013–2023), the Ghost of Present (2024–2026), and the Ghost of Future (2026 and beyond), a creative narrative device that effectively communicates the company’s long-term vision and early-mover advantage in the data protection market. Storware embodies what we can summarize as a hidden gem.

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Founded in Warsaw, Poland in 2013, Storware made a deliberate bet that the market was too VMware-centric and that open-source environments, KVM, XEN, and others, were flying without enterprise-grade data protection. They built the net. Key milestones include being first to deliver endpoint backup at global enterprise scale in 2015, pioneering Microsoft 365 data protection in 2018, and securing a Global Resell Agreement with IBM in 2019. In 2020, Dell Technologies chose Storware for co-engineered appliance solutions, their hardware, Storware’s software. In 2022, OpenText selected Storware as its data protection layer for enterprise content management at global scale. The presentation teases a fourth major OEM verdict coming in 2026, yet to be announced. The company also built OpenVirtualization.pro, a vendor-neutral community hub for architects and engineers, and was the only data protection company invited by the OpenInfra Foundation to co-author the official VMware-to-OpenStack Migration Guide.

Storware’s 2013 predictions have all materialized. The Broadcom acquisition of VMware triggered licensing increases of up to 1,000%, forcing 300,000 enterprise customers to rethink their infrastructure strategies, exactly the migration wave Storware anticipated. Ransomware remains a persistent threat, with an average breach cost of $4.88M and backups increasingly targeted first, making immutability a non-negotiable requirement. European compliance mandates (NIS2 and GDPR) are now fully enforced, and every backup vendor has suddenly discovered “AI-powered intelligent resilience.”

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The Storware platform supports a broad range of sources under a single license: virtual machines across VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat Virtualization, Nutanix AHV, OpenShift, Oracle Linux KVM, Proxmox, VergeOS and more; containers via Kubernetes and OpenShift; private cloud environments including every OpenStack flavour; storage providers such as Nutanix and Ceph RBD; applications and databases; and OS agents for Windows, Linux and macOS. Backup destinations span local file systems, S3-compatible object storage, the Storware Cloud (powered by N-able, Vawlt and Seagate), external backup providers including IBM, Dell EMC, Rubrik and Cohesity, and tape libraries. The platform claims to be the #1 backup solution for OpenStack, supporting it since 2019 across all major distributions. It has been Red Hat certified since 2019, is a Canonical Technology Alliance partner since 2024, and was the first backup vendor that VergeOS called to build a native integration. Security features are substantive and vendor-independent: IsoLayer Air-Gap isolation, immutable write-once backups, end-to-end encryption with MFA and RBAC, air-gapped tape targets, Keycloak SSO integration, and full audit trails for NIS2/GDPR compliance. The platform is deployed in three modes, software-only, a hardware+software NVMe appliance (10TB to 100TB raw capacity with up to 5:1 deduplication), and a fully managed SaaS cloud offering. By the numbers, Storware counts over 4,000 customers across 150+ countries with 300+ partners, trusted by Disney, Cisco, Lenovo, Garmin, mBank and Cloudfire.

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The roadmap is built around the concept of data gravity, the idea that data accumulates mass and becomes harder to move unless the backup platform is designed to move it. Immediate capabilities include VMware-to-OpenStack and Citrix/XCP-ng-to-OpenStack migration paths, where Storware’s existing backup infrastructure becomes the migration engine. Coming soon are OpenStack Replication DR with RPO measured in seconds rather than hours, and a NextGen Backup Appliance with denser NVMe and native support for replication and migration workloads. The company positions itself around four editorial angles for analysts and press: the post-Broadcom opportunity (they built the alternative before the crisis), the open-source expertise gap (10 years of production-grade KVM/XEN vs vendors who added it last quarter), European data sovereignty (GDPR and NIS2 native, Warsaw-built), and an honest licensing model as the direct antidote to VMware-style pricing shocks.

The full presentation is available here.