StorONE recently announced details of its Per-Drive Licensing Model. I had the opportunity to talk about the announcement with Gal Naor and George Crump about the news and thought I’d share some brief thoughts here.
Scale For Free?
Yes, at least from a licensing perspective. If you’ve bought storage from many of the traditional array vendors over the years, you would have likely paid for capacity-based licensing. Every time you upgraded the capacity of your array, there was usually a charge associated with that upgrade, beyond the hardware uplift costs. The folks at StorONE think it’s probably time that they stopped punishing customers for using higher capacity drives, so they’re shifting everything to a per-drive model.
How it Works
As I mentioned at the start, StorONE Scale-For-Free pricing is on a per-drive basis, so you can use the highest capacity, highest density drives without penalty, rather than metering capacity. The pricing is broken down thusly:
- Price per HDD $/month
- Price per SSD $/month
- Minimum $/month
- Cloud Use Case – $ per month by VM instance required
The idea is that this ultimately lowers the storage price per TB and brings some level of predictability to storage pricing.
How?
The key to this model is the availability of some key features in the StorONE solution, namely:
- A rewritten and collapsed I/O stack (meaning do more with a whole lot less)
- Auto-tiering improvements (leading to more consistent and predictable performance across HDD and SDD)
- High performance erasure coding (meaning super fast recovery from drive failure)
But That’s Not All
Virtual Storage Containers
With Virtual Storage Containers (VSC), you can apply different data services and performance profiles to different workloads (hosted on the same media) in a granular and flexible fashion. For example, if you need 4 drives and 50,000 IOPS for your File Services, you can do that. In the same environment you might also need to use a few drives for Object storage with different replication. You can do that too.
[image courtesy of StorONE]
Ransomware Detection (and Protection)
StorONE has been pretty keen on its ransomware protection capabilities, with the option to run immutable snapshots on volumes every 30 seconds and store over 500,000+ snaps per volume. But it has added in some improved telemetry to enable earlier detection of potential ransomware events on volumes, as well as introducing dual-key deletion of snapshots and improved two-factor authentication.
Thoughts
There are many things that are certain in life, including the fact that no matter how much capacity you buy for your storage array on day one, by month 18 you’re looking at ways to replace some of that capacity with higher capacity. In my former life as a diskslinger I helped many customers upgrade their arrays with increased capacity drives, and most, if not all of them, had to pay a licensing bump as well as a hardware cost for the privilege. The storage vendors would argue that that’s just the model, and for as long as you can get away with it, it is. Particularly when hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper, you need something to drive revenue. So it’s nice to see a company like StorONE looking to shake things up a little in an industry that’s probably had its way with customers for a while now. Not every storage vendor is looking to punish customers for expanding their environments, but it’s nice that those customers that were struggling with this have the option to look at other ways of using the capacity they need in a cost-effective and predictable. manner.
This doesn’t really work without the other enhancements that have gone in to StorONE, such as the improved erasure coding and automated tiering. Having a cool business model isn’t usually enough to deliver a great solution. I’m looking forward to hearing from the StorONE team in the near future about how this has been received by both existing and new customers, and what other innovations they come out with in the next 12 months.