StorONE today announces the latest update to its S1 Enterprise Storage Platform software, which extends its industry-leading data protection capabilities for mission-critical data, while at the same time lowering costs. StorONE is the only enterprise-class storage company maintaining a quarterly release schedule, bringing critical new features to its customers, and quickly meeting the needs for better performance, data reliability, and system longevity.

In addition to new capabilities in the latest release, StorONE continues to leverage its TRUprice custom configuration and pricing tool enabling customers to receive even lower pricing, breaking the $500 per GB price barrier for All-Flash Arrays (AFA). Today, StorONE is offering a fully HA, 1PB AFA for less than $500 per TB. Hybrid configurations are available for as low as $250 per TB. Customers can visit www.storone.com/truprice to design and price a storage system to meet their needs. 

"As we continue to endure the pandemic, IT professionals need to address three key concerns: price, data protection, and remote operations," said Gal Naor, StorONE co-founder and CEO. "We have had remote operations support since day one. We perform over 90% of installations without being on-site. This release extends our lead in data protection and affordability, delivering enterprises unmatched resiliency and breaking the $500 per TB AFA price point."

A key focus of the new release is improving data protection. The Q3 release advances StorONE's vRAID, a high-performance version of erasure coding, by improving RAID rebuild parallelism even further. The S1 Platform now delivers the fastest rebuild times in the industry. vRAID can rebuild flash-based volumes in three minutes. Even hard disk drive-based volumes with 16TB drives can return to a protected state within four or five hours of failure. Customers indicate that high capacity hard drive RAID groups take days, even weeks to rebuild. The speed of vRAID rebuilds reduces the need for higher drive redundancy settings, saving customers money in addition to time.

The Q3-2020 release also delivers a new feature, vRACK, which builds on vRAID to provide rack-level redundancy. The S1 Platform can now leverage vRAID to build redundancy across drive shelves and racks, further eliminating failure points. The vRACK feature offers much of the benefit of synchronous replication without the requirement of double capacity or storage controllers - yet another example of how StorONE lowers the cost of enterprise storage while improving availability.

In the Q3-2020 release, another new capability is vReplicate, which builds on StorONE's S1:Replicate feature to provide cascading replication to up to sixteen target sites. Customers can now synchronously replicate to another S1 cluster on campus while at the same time replicating to multiple S1 clusters at remote disaster recovery sites. Replication can be from any target to any target. For example, an Optane-powered All-Flash Array.next can asynchronously replicate to a hard-disk-based storage system at a disaster recovery site.

In addition to these new features, the Q3-2020 release improves the S1 Enterprise Storage Platform's consolidation capabilities. Existing customers will experience a 15% improvement in performance. The release continues to improve S1's NAS capabilities, making it a dramatically less expensive, but a better-performing alternative to aging NetApp and Isilon deployments. The Q3 release also adds support for NVMe-oF (TCP/ROCE) for host connectivity.

"Each quarter, our customers' investments in the StorONE Enterprise Storage Platform pays them dividends without requiring a hardware upgrade," said George Crump, StorONE Chief Marketing Officer. "The focus of the S1 Platform ends storage migrations through a long-lasting consolidation effort. The Q3-2020 release enables customers to not only consolidate storage, but also consolidate backup and DR into a single process that lowers costs and simplifies operations".