I had the fortune to speak with Boyan Ivanov, CEO and Founder of StorPool recently about his company’s strategy and success, including the new features of its version 21 software. The company started in 2012 by providing software-defined block storage. StorPool is a software-defined supplier, although you will need it to deploy its solution, whether on-premise or as a bare metal cloud-based configuration.
Its software runs on standard x86 servers, the Linux operating system with Ethernet and/or Infiniband networking and standard raw storage devices including hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and low- to high-end Solid State Disks (SDDs, which include NVMe drives first introduced in 2013). This pool of storage allows performance of over 1m IOPS/server with a latency of less than 100µs, according to StorPool.
At the end of 2019 StorPool began to address containers (in addition to block storage), entering the Kubernetes market with a CSI plug-in, providing persistent storage for K8S containers. Today the company’s storage software can also be used for virtual machine storage in Vmware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Linux KVM hypervisor environments.
Its latest software release (version 21 introduced in October) added Magic Erasure-Coding (EC), which allows block storage to be split across multiple nodes and clusters ensuring resilience against disk failure. Specifically designed for Tier 0/1 workloads, this function runs continuously in a non-disruptive way and provides data protection across nodes with much shorter rebuild times than RAID 6-like schemes.
StorPool’s storage can be integrated into a number of environments including CloudStack, Kubernetes, OnApp, OpenNebula, OpenStack, Proxmox and Vmware. Its reference customers include Atos, CloudSigma, Cloud.nl and NASDAQ Dubai.
As a small privately-owned company it is difficult to assess StorPool’s market share in the storage market. It has made a number of announcements about its performance over the years. For instance it reported:

• A 450% revenue growth, a tripling of its customer count and capacity growth of 380% for 2016 over 2015,
• Revenue growth of 40% for H1 2020 over H1 2019,
• A Compound Average Growth Rate (CAGR) of 69.29% for the years 2017-2020,
• Revenue growth of 30% for 2021 over 2020 and
• A 46% CAGR revenue for the period between 2018 and 2021.

I can’t wait for it to grow enough to be listed so I can enter its results into the ITCandor assessment model. It’s enough to say for now is that it is a small, but growing, expert storage supplier. Its innovative approach should become much more well known and deployed in future.