StorONE and Seagate join forces to solve important storage-related challenges

StorONE announced a new solution with Seagate that promises to extend the hybrid storage use case while lowering the cost of production, archive and backup storage.

The new solution combines updated versions of StorONE and Seagate’s successful hybrid storage solutions based on StorONE’s Enterprise Storage Platform software and Seagate’s Next-Gen Application Platform (AP), the Exos AP BV-1. The Seagate Exos AP BV-1 is the 2nd GEN AMD EPYC server module. It supports Seagate’s existing family of compatible system enclosures, including the Exos AP 2U12, Exos AP 2U24, and Exos AP 5U84, providing a range of storage enclosures for 12 to 84 drives, ideally suited to StorONE’s Enterprise Storage Platform.

“Seagate’s enterprise systems have seen ten consecutive quarters of growth in channel sales due to the product innovation, quality, and value delivered to customers. Software solutions utilizing these systems are critical to enabling enterprises to deliver business value and solve important storage-related challenges such as ransomware protection,” according to Samantha Clarke, director of systems for Seagate. “We have worked with StorONE for several years and look forward to working with them to optimize performance and address more use cases through the next generation of Seagate’s Exos AP application platform.”

A ransomware resilient backup storage solution

A widespread use case for Seagate/StorONE customers is as a backup storage target to elevate the customer’s ransomware resiliency while shrinking their threat exposure window. StorONE’s S1:Backup with the Seagate Exos AP BV-1 provides enhanced ransomware protection for backup infrastructures:

• Flash-First Backups for faster, more frequent data protection, improving recovery point objectives (RPO).
• The improved immutability of every backup job across any storage protocol.
• The performance backup software vendors need to host backup software metadata immutably.
• Sterile Recovery Target delivers production-class performance and features at backup storage prices.

The StorONE Enterprise Storage Platform with the Seagate Exos AP BV-1 is the first backup storage solution with intelligent flash-first storage. All backups are first received on a flash tier to improve backup performance, enabling IT to increase protection frequency. Then the StorONE S1:Backup software uses a new predictive tiering algorithm, moving old backup data to the hard disk tier during less busy times, eliminating the concerns of forced migration when receiving a new backup job.

The S1:Backup solution can also move data to and from the hard disk tier in record time, thanks to the efficient StorONE engine, which can take full advantage of the 2X bandwidth provided by the Exos AP BV-1, as compared with the previous generation product.

Backup data is also sequentially written to the hard disk tier for the best utilization, and higher performing recalls. Finally, because StorONE software manages the entire IO path, it can continue optimizing and refining hard drive performance as the technology advances.

Recoveries are automatically instantiated on the flash tier. Thanks to the power of the new Seagate Exos AP, combined with the efficient StorONE engine, the solution delivers production-class performance at backup storage prices. The Exos AP’s dual-controller architecture, combined with StorONE’s data protection capabilities, enables the solution to become standby storage or backup storage that can support production applications, without compromise.

“StorONE is the first vendor in over a decade to rewrite and optimize the storage IO stack for modern storage innovations like Seagate’s Exos AP platform and high-capacity hard disk drives,” said Gal Naor, StorONE’s CEO and co-Founder. “This significant development and investment enables StorONE powered appliances to deliver better performance and data protection at a lower cost while consuming a smaller data center footprint.”

StorONE’s Enterprise Storage Platform solutions using the Seagate Exos AP BV-1 are available now from StorONE and Seagate distributors. Seagate Exos AP BV-1 configurations optimized for StorONE include:

• The Exos AP 2U12 Hybrid Array configuration – with 19TB of flash and 126TB of HDD, ideal for small data centers or remote offices.
• The Exos AP 2U24 All-Flash Array – with 184TB of Flash, ideal for virtualized and database environments. The Exos AP 2U24 is unique among AFAs because it can expand using hard disk drive enclosures.
• The Exos AP 5U84 Hybrid Array – with 107TB of flash and 1.2PB of HDD, an ideal mainstream data center workhorse capable of using StorONE’s S1:Backup software to be a backup storage target or the Enterprise Storage Platform and meet a wide variety of data center use cases, including Backup, Archiving, NAS, Virtualized and Database environments.