Data protection and management vendor StorageCraft Technology Corp. has introduced its second industry-specific storage solution, this time for customers in the education sector.
Dubbed StorageCraft for Education, the system employs the Draper, Utah-based vendor’s scale-out OneBlox storage arrays to help K-12 school districts, colleges, and universities manage rapidly swelling data volumes cost-effectively.
“Most classes these days are conducted with videos,” notes Shridar Subramanian, vice president for marketing and product management at StorageCraft. Stowing all of that content, he continues, quickly exhausts the legacy storage systems most education clients rely on.
“It actually places a significant amount of strain on the backend infrastructure,” Subramanian says. “What they end up doing is either going through forklift upgrades or implementing many more of these legacy storage solutions, which creates data islands.”
Those data islands, in turn, produce a data management nightmare, Subramanian continues.
“One has to make sure that each application is pointing to the right location in order to get to those pieces of data,” he observes. “All of these problems become really aggravated as the amount of data grows and one creates many, many, many silos of storage within the institution.”
Limited IT funding, especially for public schools, only compounds the problem.
“The budget for this particular vertical is not growing,” Subramanian says. “They’ve got to be able to manage all of those data explosion with the same amount of infrastructure that they have.”
Available in both hard disk drive-based and all-flash configurations, StorageCraft for Education lets end users simply tack on more OneBlox units, all of which share a single namespace, as their storage capacity needs increase.
That, StorageCraft contends, is not only an easily managed answer to swelling data quantities but an affordable one too. The all-flash version of the product, the company says, costs less than fifty cents per effective GB, adding that built-in deduplication and compression functionality magnify those savings by enabling organizations to save more data in the same amount of space.
According to Subramanian, StorageCraft for Education also offers an economical on-premises alternative to the public cloud storage solutions many education customers are experimenting with at present.
“Over a period of a year to two years they find that proposition to be extremely expensive,” he says. Based on the manufacturer’s internal calculations, in fact, StorageCraft for Education costs up to 50 percent less than many public cloud solutions, including Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, over a three-year period.
Though StorageCraft’s new education solution doesn’t integrate directly with its ShadowProtect BDR and StorageCraft Cloud Services offerings, buyers can utilize the three products together to replicate production data in an offsite repository.
Until August 15th, users who purchase a OneBlox 4312 array with eight 8TB drives receive an additional four 8TB drives plus ShadowProtect SPX licenses at no additional cost. List price for the bundled offer is $11,995.
Also for a limited time, an entry-level StorageCraft for Education configuration that provides more than 190TB of effective storage capacity starts at less than $38,000. That package includes two OneBlox 4312 appliances to enable both on-premises storage and offsite remote replication.
StorageCraft launched its first vertical industry solution, for law enforcement agencies, in March. The company plans to release more industry-focused systems in the future.
The OneBlox storage system was invented by Exablox Inc. StorageCraft announced an alliance pact with that company in October 2016, and bought it outright in January 2017.
The investment has been paying rich dividends since. StorageCraft has seen a 400 percent increase in distribution sales of OneBlox units on a year-over-year basis in the last 12 months. 45 percent of companies that purchase an initial OneBlox array end up buying more over time as well, suggesting that OneBlox solutions are an ongoing source of hardware revenue for StorageCraft and its partners alike.
