Tech Data, StorOne Formalize Distribution Agreement

Six years in development and less than two years since launching its Total Resource Utilization (TRU) software-defined storage (SDS) product, StorOne and Tech Data have formalized their distribution partnership.

Pursuing a channel-only go-to-market sales strategy, StorOne signed with Tech Data for product distribution, support and service in North America. The agreement expands the availability of StorOne’s more robust offer including all flash array, virtual machine, high capacity and secondary storage solutions.

“We are excited to expand our product portfolio with four different solutions derived from the same, single software offering,” said Joe Cousins, vice president, global computing components at Tech Data. “StorOne’s software-defined storage offerings are compelling because of their ability to deliver high performance, high capacity and complete integrated enterprise data protection.  These data services, in conjunction with the hardware solutions in our portfolio, offer customers truly unified enterprise storage solutions that can be customized to best meet their exacting needs.”

StorOne is on the forefront of the SDS market with its unique single platform (S1) that supports all storage services for a variety of use cases.

StorOne’s Gal Naor

“We built a platform with full flexibility and all the services. We support all drive types – NVMe, SSD, HDD – mix and match in the same storage system, all storage protocol – block, file and object – and we also include integrated data protection,” Gal Naor, founder and CEO at StorOne, told Channel Futures. “Our solution is also hardware-agnostic.”

More specifically, StorOne SDS completely separates the software from the hardware to reap benefits such as:

To date, StorOne has worked with partners on a case-by-case basis and has about 50 projects under its belt. The vendor doesn’t have a formal partner program but plans to announce one in the coming months.

Until then, StorOne, working with Tech Data, is looking for partners who have experience selling storage solutions and also have technical storage experience. For these partners, Naor boasts that StorOne provides the same storage solution with 80 percent less hardware compared to any storage on the market today, and offers all the storage and services on a single platform.

“That means partners can compete with the six different storage types – all-flash arrays, HCI [and so on] – [to] increase their market share and go after competitor accounts,” he said.

StorOne is no ordinary storage startup. In 2004, Naor co-founded Storwize with the goal of radically changing the economics of storage. IBM acquired the company in 2010.