Simplify Your Storage Infrastructure with StorONE

Flexibility, Performance, Efficiency

StorONE All-Flash is a 2U array that is all about the price to performance. The company has done a few interesting things here with storage tiering. As opposed to using Intel Optane SSD as a cache, the StorONE array uses Optane as its top tier of storage.

?StorONE partnership with Intel leverages QLC 3D NAND SSDs for the high-capacity storage. The solution is powered by StorONE’s S1 Enterprise Storage Platform software and moves data based on needs to keep performance high while managing data economics with the QLC SSDs. Though StorONE is a very flexible software-defined storage solution that can pretty much do it all, it's real strength lays within what they call “total resource utilization.” Whereas many defined software platforms have bottlenecks that prevent users from getting the most out of their hardware, StorONE offers users a way to bypass them to get the best performance possible. This certainly makes for a compelling solution for organizations looking to deploy storage in almost any environment and is ideal for those who want to squeeze every last IOPS possible out of their system.

Cross-platform compatible, including Mac, Linux, Windows, and even mobile operating systems. This is especially useful for IT management teams, as it allows you to pull out your tablet or phone if you need to locate a specific disk while walking around in a large server room or data center.

For customers who have capacity needs and don’t want to get stuck with a long-term contract, StorONE can send you a box with everything you need and you can just simply wipe the drives and send it back when you’re done with it.

Dashboard, which gives quick access to all the configuration areas: Monitoring, Provisioning (Template, Host, NAS Server, Applications Volumes), Management (Templates, Hosts, NAS Servers, Applications Volumes), Inventory and Administration. ?

The Inventory section gives you a list of all the physical assets of your system on the right. Clicking them will further drill down the specific components, giving you further information.

Creating a volume is pretty simple. ??Simply enter the name, description, and other information. Under the disk pool section, you can define the different tiers for the built-in auto-tiering functionality, which is one of the most important advantages of the StorONE platform.

?Tiering settings allow you to choose which disk pool the newly created volume will primarily reside on (e.g., NVMe/SSD media as the primary disk pool and HDD/SSD media as the high tier 1). As a result, it will take a look at the data on this system and then analyze things like read and write patterns and how long it has been since the data was accessed (and how often), then “tier it” down based on this information. This means that infrequently-accessed data-blocks will move down to the lower-cost tier if you’ve set your volume up that way. This ensures that you aren’t wasting your valuable, speedy NVMe space on files you are not using very often, keeping your most-used data located on those drives.

You can also define your snapshot policy here, which is unlimited and free. You can scale in and out of the time frame with the handy magnifying glass icon. Your mounted snapshots will also be listed under your volumes.

?In the Availability section, you can also define how many data and redundancy fragments are on the system you need. This makes for a highly flexible system, as systems usually use RAID-based configurations, which cannot be changed on the volume level (i.e., you are stuck with the RAID you choose).

You can also access the same data over two protocols (e.g., NFS and SMB), which can come in really handy as you only need to send one copy of your data through various protocols.

?StorONE supports block-based access with iSCSI and Fibre Channel, NAS – SMB and NFS and has a built-in Object-store that supports S3 protocol while also future-proofed its platform. For example, if a new technology is released the StorONE system will be able to utilize it. Though it’s impossible to verify this claim, it’s certainly good to hear and they’ve done well to embrace new storage and network protocols thus far.

?If you click on Performance after you select your volume in the Applications section, you can get a live look at the IOPS, throughput and latency or how it performed in the last hour, day or week.

The Monitoring section is a comprehensive page that displays all the statistics that are being collected from your system. You can find things like capacities, data allocation and utilization (per pool, which is very handy), graphs, and top volumes in your system (sorted by things like IOPS, snapshots, latency and capacity). You can also see the system hardware utilization at the bottom, which displays the disk, CPU and memory usage both live and during certain past time frames.

To learn more, feel free to email me directly at [email protected] My team is top notch and glad to setup introductions to check for synergy.