2019 kept us busy. We listened to our customers, observed the market and the challenges enterprises faced. Led by careful analysis, observation and feedback, we developed and upgraded our enterprise solutions accordingly with more security, compliance and storage optimization features. But that’s not all.
We also introduced data migration services and MSP solutions for resellers, managed IT services providers and large organizations.
In this article, we’ll share our journey of innovation for the year 2019. To simplify your reading experience, let us give you an overview of what you should expect to read in this post:
2019 Overview – Our Journey
- Three Enterprise Products Introduced
- StoneFusion MSP Edition – Enterprise Storage Provisioning Software
- Disaggregated High Availability (HA) Infrastructure for Storage & Backup & DR Solutions
- Data Migration Services – Live VM Migration | NAS & SAN Migration
- Major Product Update(s)
- Latest Version of StoneFly Storage Operating System Released
- StoneFly Events in 2019
- StoneFly at VMworld 2019
- StoneFly visits South Korean Resellers
- Korean Reseller at 2019 ICT Device Industry Festival
- What to Expect in 2020
- NVMe SSD Support for All StoneFly HCI Appliances
- StoneFly Partner Portal Update
Three Enterprise Products Introduced
In 2019, we introduced three enterprise products:
- StoneFusion MSP Edition – for Managed Services Providers (MSPs), managed IT services providers, and large organizations
- Disaggregated HA Infrastructure – supported in StoneFly storage and backup & DR solutions
- Data Migration Services – for NAS, SAN and Virtual Machine (VM) migration
Let’s briefly overview all of them:
StoneFusion MSP Edition – Enterprise Storage Provisioning Software
MSPs, storage resellers, and data center owners need a way to leverage their available storage space and provision storage resources to customers, end users, and departments, teams or projects. To help with this use-case, we came up with StoneFusion MSP edition.
StoneFusion MSP edition is a storage provisioning software that enables users to provision virtual NAS (vNAS), virtual SAN (vSAN), virtual unified NAS + SAN, and S3 object storage volumes on industry standard hypervisors for remote and multi-tenant file-level, block-level or converged storage.
With parent-child licenses, users control the provisioned volumes and deliver isolated, noise-less and full appliance experience to customers, departments, projects and end users.
What do we mean by “full-appliance” experience?
To the end user or customer, the provisioned virtual storage resources appear the same as a fully functional hardware appliance with compute, system memory and storage; along with necessary data services such as snapshots, replication, encryption, etc.
Supported Hypervisors
The StoneFusion MSP software can be deployed as a virtual storage appliance or VM on the following industry standard hypervisors:
- VMware
- Hyper-V
- KVM
- Citrix (formerly XenServer)
Any hardware hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) capable of supporting these hypervisors can support StoneFusion MSP. For more details about hardware specifications and compatibility, please contact StoneFly pre-sales engineers.
Supported Storage Protocols
With StoneFusion MSP users can provision and communicate with the following storage protocols:
- NAS – NFS & CIFS/SMB
- SAN – iSCSI & Fibre Channel
- Object – S3 Storage
StoneFusion MSP Features & Data Services
StoneFusion MSP enhances the user storage provisioning experience by delivering a number of enterprise-grade features and data services. Following is a brief list of said features:
- Immutable Read-Only Snapshots
- Synchronous & Asynchronous Replication
- Hardware-Enabled Volume Encryption
- Deduplication for NAS & SAN volumes
- Automated Tiering
- Thin Provisioning with Space Reclamation
- Erasure Coding
- And more!
For a detailed list of StoneFusion MSP features, please contact StoneFly sales.
To read the press release about StoneFusion MSP, click here.
Disaggregated HA Infrastructure for Storage & Backup & DR Solutions
One of the biggest concerns of data owners today is the availability of business-critical data. The disaggregated HA infrastructure is StoneFly’s answer to high availability requirements.
Instead of the traditional “single box” approach, the disaggregated HA infrastructure starts with at least 3 hardware chassis:
- Two Storage Controllers or HCI Controllers (if hyperconverged)
- One or More HA RAID Storage Expansion Arrays
The dual storage controllers provide multi-path and redundant access to storage resources in the HA RAID array while the dual active/active RAID controllers in the RAID array chassis secure businesses from downtime and disruption.
This makes the disaggregated HA infrastructure a good choice for enterprise environments with high data availability requirements and expectations.
Read the details of StoneFly disaggregated HA infrastructure in the fourth article of our “Data Center Hardware Overview” Series: Data Center Hardware Overview: Disaggregated HA Appliances.
To read the press release about the disaggregated HA infrastructure, click here.
Data Migration Services – Live VM Migration | NAS & SAN Migration
Cloud adoption is accelerating. Businesses are looking to the cloud for archiving, offsite disaster recovery, and other similar use-cases. But how can businesses migrate their business-critical applications, files, folders and volumes in a reliable and secure way to desired cloud repositories? Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) offer gateways for their own cloud storage repositories but they’re either expensive or lead to vendor lock-in. This is why we developed StoneFly Migrate and Live Migration.
Our data migration services enable users to quickly and securely move data from their on-premises servers to cloud repositories. But that’s not the only deployment option our solutions facilitate.
We also support data migration from on-premises-to-on-premises (clustering and campus mirroring), on-premises-to-offsite, and on-premises-to-cloud.
With our data migration services, users can migrate:
- NAS Volumes (NFS & CIFS/SMB)
- SAN Volumes (iSCSI & Fibre Channel)
- VMs Running on Industry Standard Hypervisors (VMware, Hyper-V, KVM and Citrix or XenServer)
StoneFly Live Migration is especially good for businesses that do not want to go through the hassle of shutting down VMs and then migrating them to desired targets. With the Live Migration service, VMs continue running while they’re migrated and built-in features ensure that no data is lost during the migration process.
Get a full featured free trial of our innovative data migration solution today; no credit cards needed. To get started, contact StoneFly sales.
Major Product Update(s)
In 2019, we released version 8.0.4 of our patented storage operating system. We also added several new features to our Smart cloud storage gateway solutions to address data security, optimization and compliance concerns.
Latest Version of StoneFly Storage Operating System Released
The latest release added the following features to our enterprise-grade storage operating system:
- WORM (Write-Once Read-Many) storage provisioning
- Automated malware, virus and ransomware detection & removal
- Deduplication for NAS volumes (in addition to dedup for SAN)
- Real-time graphical performance reporting (GUI update)
Note: These features are now generally available for all StoneFly NAS, SAN, unified NAS + SAN, and HCI appliances.
In other words, whether you purchase a StoneFly storage or backup & DR appliance or only the storage operating system license, whether it’s StoneFusion for Bare-Metal or SCVM virtual storage appliance, the above mentioned features are now included.
For more details about our storage operating system features and data services, please contact StoneFly sales.
Note: The above mentioned features are also available in StoneFly Smart cloud gateway solution (both virtual gateway and hardware gateway appliances).
StoneFly Events in 2019
While we came up with innovative, affordable and enterprise-grade solutions in 2019, we also stepped out of the lab to talk to our audience, share our experiences and listen to the challenges they face.
VMworld (US) 2019 – We were there!
StoneFly team visited the VMworld 2019 event and had a table at Café X right across from the Moscone center. We had a great experience discussing StoneFly and VMware’s role in enterprise projects and how the powerful combination can truly benefit and empower government and corporate IT environments.
We wrote about it too. To read the blog post about StoneFly at VMworld 2019, click here.
StoneFly visits South Korean Resellers
StoneFly team decided to pay a visit to our Korean resellers (Nettars Technology). The visit was filled with training sessions and discussions about our data management solutions. But our team also got to enjoy South Korean hospitality.
StoneFly team visited the VMworld 2019 event and had a table at Café X right across from the Moscone center. We had a great experience discussing StoneFly and VMware’s role in enterprise projects and how the powerful combination can truly benefit and empower government and corporate IT environments.
We wrote about it too. To read the blog post about StoneFly at VMworld 2019, click here.
Korean Reseller at 2019 ICT Device Industry Festival
Our Korean resellers took the stage in the 2019 ICT Device Industry Festival and talked about our patented storage virtualization solution: SCVM. They also successfully demonstrated the deployment and use of the virtual storage appliance on VMware, Hyper-V and XenServer hypervisors.
This was a brief description of StoneFly’s journey in 2019. We introduced new products, we upgraded our solutions, and we participated in events so that we could interact with our audience and our customers so that we can continue producing customer-centric solutions.
Now that we’ve talked about the past, let’s talk about the future.
What to Expect in 2020?
We like to think of ourselves as problem solvers and solution providers. In 2020, we intend to aggressively continue our pursuit in finding problems and offering simple, affordable and efficient data center solutions.
There are several projects in the works at StoneFly and some of them cannot be disclosed just yet; so you’ll have to bear with us. But we do have some information to share about upcoming product updates and services:
NVMe SSD Support for All StoneFly HCI Appliances
In today’s enterprise world, speed matters almost as much as quality-of-service and product. The ability to read and write quicker and execute applications quicker has a major impact on how a business fairs against the competition.
That’s why we’re already on our way to add NVMe SSD support for all of our HCI appliances. This includes:
StoneFly Partner Portal Update
We’re also updating our partner portal to make quote generation simpler. And we’re adding a whole bunch of features that will make management easier for our resellers, partners and our partner representatives.
For more details, you’ll have to keep an eye on our social media posts and our press release section.
Lastly, We Wish You a Happy New Year!
If you need help with your data management needs, we’re here for you. You can get in touch with us at:
Email: sales@staging.stonefly.com
Phone: +1 (510) 265-1616
Be sure to connect with us on Linkedin, Twitter & Facebook, to stay up to date on our enterprise data management solutions.
Resource(s):
What have we been doing in 2018 (Read here)
