New York City-based StorONE, which launched its product in late 2017 following a long product development process, is broadening out its go-to-market strategy. The company initially came to market through a channel of system integrators. It is now expanding this with a distribution deal with Tech Data. It will see StorONE products available through Tech Data first in North America, and eventually, globally.

StorONE’s management team is that same one that was behind dedupe vendor StorWIZE, which StorONE CEO and co-founder Gal Naor founded in 2004, and later sold to IBM in 2010 for $140 million.  Their objective with StorONE is to make a product that is highly disruptive, and which can handle a multitude of storage use cases at extremely low pricing.

“Storage today is very fragmented and niche, with each solution being designed for specific use cases,” Naor told ChannelBuzz. “StorONE is designed to give the channel a fuller storage solution – with high performance, high capacity and data protection –  that can compete in all the different segments of storage, even GPFS.”

StorONE’s technology, backed by several dozen patents, is designed to be completely storage-agnostic.

“It fits with any storage solution – AFA, hyperconverged, hybrid, virtual machine, scale-out NAS, cloud, or GPFS high performance,” Naor said. “It does them all without any degradation. It also supports all protocols, block file and object. It covers the entire market, and provides the proper degree of data protection for each. We can also mix and match any kind of drives – HDD, NVMe or SSD, and even different kinds of SSDs. We can also provide a full range of services, in addition to being able to use any kind of hardware.”

StorONE also emphasizes a price differential.

“The challenge today is to give the best results, and we do this with the lowest pricing, the lowest CAPEX and lowest OPEX – so it is future proofed for customers,” Naor said.

While at launch, StorONE sold through a channel of integrator partners in their proof-of-concept stage, the Tech Data deal is intended to scale their market out more rapidly.

“We have been in business for eight years, seven years of which we took to develop the product,” Naor said. “Now we want to scale fast.”

Distribution is essential to get this scalability, he added.

“It’s much better for us to engage with distribution. Once we establish an opportunity with a channel partner, they start to push our product. It has been designed to work with channel partners, and the ability to be used in any scenario and with any protocol, makes it very channel-friendly. We didn’t sign with Tech Data for them to deliver opportunities. Those are coming anyway. What they can do is help us to scale fast with delivery to the customer.”

Tech Data was chosen because Naor has had good results with them in the past.

“We have had a few opportunities together, and they understand their storage very well,” he said.