StorONE, a provider of storage systems for on-premise IT environments, announced this week that it has formed an alliance with Tech Data to make available an All-Flash Arrays as-a-Service (AFAaaS) offering to channel partners that can be consumed on a subscription basis without any long-term commitment required.
Priced on a per terabyte basis, the goal is to make deploying storage systems in on-premises IT environments as simple to sell and consume as a cloud storage service, says StorONE CEO Gal Naor.
The All AFAaaS systems come in five 18, 20, 40, 60, and 80 TB configuration, with performance ranging from 100,000 up to 600,000 IOPs. The systems support block, file, and object protocols on the same drives and can be employed in iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NFS, and S3 environments. Support for all drive types are provided on the same server and data management and protection capabilities such as such as unlimited snapshots are included.
AFAaaS models with S1 storage services are priced at about 50 cents per GB per month. Channel partners and their customers can cancel or modify their plan with a 90-day notice.
This approach makes it simpler for channel partners selling on-premises platforms to compete with rival offerings delivered via the cloud, says Naor.
“They can now compete with the cloud,” says Naor.
Naor says StorONE is able to provide this service because rather than relying on inefficient RAID architectures, the STORone S1 platform is based on a proprietary abstraction that not only makes more efficient use of solid-state drives (SSDs), it also accelerates drive rebuild times, eliminates dedicated hot spares, and offers highly granular, user-definable resiliency levels. The S1 platform also allows unlimited, nestable, writeable, and persistent snapshots with zero performance impact, says Naor. Organizations can run random and sequential workloads, cloud-native and legacy applications, and support containers, microservices, and line-of-business applications, all on the same storage platform, notes Naor.
StorONE chose Tech Data to help finance this initiative because it extends an existing relationship with the distributor, adds Naor.
It’s not likely all data will be moving into the cloud any time soon. However, it’s apparent end customers increasingly prefer to treat all forms of IT as an operating rather than capital expense regardless of where data happens to be physically located. As a result, channel partners need to be able to keep all their business model option open.
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