From StorONE, AFA.next Storage Tier System With Optane Technology

StorONE, Inc. announced the AFA.next (AFAn), which uses Intel Optane technology as a storage tier not as a cache.

It integrates Intel QLC 3D NAND SSDs for cost effective, high capacity, moving data between the 2 storage tiers as it ages. The company’s S1:AFAn is a performing, cost effective storage system. Powered by the firm’s S1 storage software, it is designed for traditional enterprise data centers.

The AFAn represents a breed of storage solutions that are a logical upgrade to aging AFA. It supports mainstream workloads like VMware, Hyper-V, Oracle and MS-SQL, while at the same time providing the performance required of applications such as analytics and AI. The result is true storage consolidation at a price every data center can afford.

“We are pleased with StorONE’s use of Intel Optane SSDs in their new S1:AFAn product offering. This will bring new and exciting enterprise storage services to data centers of all sizes,” said Chris Tobias, GM, Optane solutions division, Intel Corp.

A key ingredient of the S1:AFAn is the company’s S1 Enterprise Storage platform, a storage software solution that is able to extract the performance of Optane SSDs and offset costs by automatically tiering to lower cost Intel QLC 3D NAND SSDs, without read performance penalty. S1 provides complete data protection and data services without impacting performance.

“The S1:AFAn represents the next gen of enterprise storage,” said Gal Naor, CEO, StorONE. “S1:AFAn enables customers to start with as little as 30TBs of capacity, a configuration capable of delivering over 1 million IO/s, and then grow performance and capacity, independently as organizations’ needs demand. We’ve added the AFAn configuration option to our transparent pricing site, TRUprice. Customers can use TRUprice to configure and price an AFAn and see, in realtime, that the S1:AFAn solution costs less than competitors’ AFAs.”

CompuTech International (CTI) is the distributor of S1:AFAn.

“CTI is pleased to partner with Intel and StorONE to help bring the AFAn to market. AFAs are a decade old technology that should now be considered obsolete. The AFAn brings Intel’s revolutionary Intel Optane Technology to a whole new market, the traditional enterprise data center. With the AFAn, customers can meet all of their performance demands at a price lower than legacy AFAs,” said Eyal Shachi, CEO, CTI.

Thanks to S1 software, the AFA automatically tiers data from the Optane SSD tier to an Intel QLC 3D NAND SSD storage tier. Using Optane SSD as a tier of storage and not a cache, enterprise customers enjoy the full write performance of Optane SSDs as well as its read performance. S1:Tier feature is also optimized for QLC drives to extend their durability and life. When the S1:Tier technology demotes older data from the Optane SSD tier, it writes it to QLC in large sequential blocks. Since the Intel QLC 3D NAND SSD tier can provide read performance at near – Optane SSD performance levels, there is no need to promote data unless the application modifies it. These optimizations enable organizations to expect long life from the QLC 3D NAND SSD tier and see no performance impact when reading from it.

“The S1:AFAn is more than just old software trying to take advantage of new hardware,” said George Crump, CMO, StorONE. “StorONE’s S1 Enterprise Storage Platform was written from the ground up to take advantage of technologies like Intel Optane Technology. We are delivering specific optimizations in how we write data to the Intel Optane Technology tier, as well as how we manage the QLC tier. Our software is carefully crafted to make sure customers receive full performance and full data integrity at a price they can afford.”

The AFAn using Optane Technology is shipping from July 6 with StorONE taking pre-orders.

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