StorageCraft sounds like an arty handmade set of drawers – but it's spun up a Cohesity-Rubrik type box for small biz

For people on a budget

StorageCraft has flung a converged scale-out box at small and medium businesses – in the hope that there's room in the market for Cohesity and Rubrik-style enterprise storage and data protection for those with a modest budget.

The firm has pitched its OneXafe box as a converged scale-out storage and data protection system for SMBs' physical and virtual servers. In January 2017, it bought small-biz object storage startup Exablox, which built deduplicated scale-out filer arrays using object storage internally.

Shortly before the acquisition, in October 2016, Exablox combined StorageCraft's ShadowProtect backup software with its OneBlox nodes. At the time we said StorageCraft's portfolio included an integrated suite of backup, disaster recovery, system migration, virtualization, and data protection software running on Windows and Linux for medium-sized businesses.

Now, in effect, the StorageCraft and Exablox technologies have been combined.

There are three models, with OneXafe 4412 and 4417 capacity-optimised systems and an all-flash 5412 version offering instant recovery and fast-access unstructured data to serve primary virtual server production applications. OneXafe has a patented distributed object-based file system – the Exablox software it slurped – which is integrated with data protection services. The file system delivers NFS and SMB data access for primary and secondary storage.

It scales from a single node to a multi-petabyte cluster, we're told. The management is delivered remotely as-a-service by a OneSystem facility. It has both VMware and VSS integration and provides work flow and capacity usage analytics. The data protection is SLA-based and policy-driven, according to StorageCraft.

A StorageCraft OneXafe box

An on-premises OneXafe system can replicate data to StorageCraft Cloud Services with a claimed single-click recovery of data, compute, and network services in an orchestrated recovery workflow, which – if it works as marketed – seems to be looking to eat Rubrik and Cohesity's lunch.

Will SMBs want a single storage scale-out box with cloud-based management to handle all their storage and data protection needs? If their current system is a complex and costly mess, it may be an appealing fix. Datasheets can be found here. OneXafe disk-based 4400 starts at less than $14,000 for 144TB (about $97 per terabyte) with the all-flash 5400 series starting at less than $30,000 for 38TB ($790 per terabyte). How do these stack up against Rubrik and Cohesity?

A web source says Rubrik's R334 (three-node, 36TB) backup appliance unit list price is around $100,000 MSRP. That is nearly $2800/TB, which is more expensive than StorageCraft's OneXafe 5400.

A Cohesity pricing web source says a three-node Cohesity C2300 (48TB raw, using 4TB disk drives, 800GB PCIe Flash cards per node) starts at $90,000. That's $1875/TB, again more expensive than OneXafe's 4400.

OneXafe products are available from StorageCraft's channel. ®