“We provide a complete storage solution with the flexibility and versatility that modern companies need to deliver reliable and fast services to their customers.” Read more about StorPool’s solution, our vision and our goals for the future in the interview of Alex Ivanov, Product Lead at StorPool Storage, for Economy.bg.
This article is a translation of the interview for Economy.bg. You can find the original article in Bulgarian here.
What are the key products/solutions that StorPool Storage teams are working on?
StorPool Storage is a Bulgarian company that develops its own solution for block storage – a software product for distributed data storage in cloud environments. Our solution is used by many companies worldwide that serve millions of users globally. The unique software solution helps large enterprises, SaaS vendors and IT service providers deliver fast and reliable applications to their end-users. It is the perfect foundation for companies that manage their own cloud infrastructure and need to optimize it to grow their business, solve their data storage issues, or need fast and reliable access to their data to do their job effectively.
We rank among the top providers of such solutions, often winning deals versus giants like IBM, Dell, HPE, NetApp, Pure Storage and others. The global IT leaders Atos, Dustin, CloudSigma, Nasdaq Dubai, Kualo, Amito and others are among the companies that take advantage of our reliable and fast storage systems.
Could you tell us briefly about the product?
StorPool is an intelligent software solution for optimizing data storage. This unique storage software is the most reliable and speedy storage platform on the market. It is installed on standard server equipment and aggregates the capacity of storage devices in the servers (HDDs, SSDs). StorPool converts these standard servers into a storage system that is fast, reliable, flexible and cost-effective. The software was created entirely by Bulgarian engineers and is constantly evolving to meet the changing needs of the businesses that wish to upgrade and optimize their infrastructure.
According to StorPool customers, the main reason for choosing our solution is the uniqueness and innovativeness of the technology, which does not exist in its counterparts. They also prefer StorPool because of our team’s high technical knowledge and expertise in building powerful cloud infrastructure. Also, our team successfully assists customers at all stages of the process and provides high-quality support.
What technologies do you use?
The software is entirely developed by us. We have used different technologies in order to enrich the platform, add more flexibility and integrate the solution in various other ecosystems, such as Kubernetes, CloudStack, OpenStack, VMware, etc. For the company’s internal systems, we use Kubernetes and OpenNebula, and of course, StorPool Storage is the only storage system that we use as a basis for all our environments.
How is the work process organized, and what is the management structure?
We organize the overall work process at several different levels, but also we are trying to minimize the bureaucracy and boost flexibility.
The market requires us to be flexible and implement the necessary changes in the fastest and most trouble-free way to continue to meet the high requirements of our potential and current customers. That is why so far, we have always relied on the team’s outstanding expertise and excellent company culture, which drives everything else – from sharing knowledge through mutual assistance to quick and easy communication between the people in the company. Perhaps our most important principle, without which StorPool would not exist today, is our focus on the high quality of everything we do as a team.
How has the product changed over the years?
Over the years, we had the chance to “play” in a vast and competitive international market. We had the opportunity and freedom to develop our software product according to users’ needs and create a unique solution that has no analogue in the world. We never stop analyzing the market and identifying the challenges and problems that companies managing large volumes of data are experiencing or may experience in the future. We provide a complete storage solution with the flexibility and versatility that modern companies need to provide reliable and fast services to their customers.
To stay competitive, StorPool never stops making changes and planning future updates while solving every single issue even before it arises. We can boldly declare that we have many customers that never had a single minute of downtime for years – even during scheduled maintenance, disks replacements, replacements of the entire infrastructure or even a change in location of the whole cloud infrastructure.
StorPool’s software is designed to deal with software and hardware issues in the best way possible, without interruptions, while maintaining the proper operations and the maximum performance of the customers’ user-facing services.
What are the biggest challenges with this product?
One of the significant challenges for the company is definitely the dynamic market of storage solutions in the world. Every year there are new waves of technology and vendors who claim to solve all market problems and receive tens of millions of dollars in funding from US venture capital funds. Despite all the obstacles, we manage to stay competitive and excel in the market. We are proud that we have achieved such great success in just one decade, and we’ll continue to pursue even bigger successes in the future.
What are the greatest achievements you can note about your product?
The last few years have been extremely successful for us thanks to the efforts we have invested in the development, maintenance and promotion of our product. We are gaining customers, we are listed in online rankings, receive awards, and people include us in various reports that analyze the future development of the storage industry in the coming years. Each year, we manage to gain even more customers and a larger market share and grow our business effectively.
We did not slow down in our development even during the pandemic, and in 2020 we reported 80% growth of the company. In 2021, in addition to maintaining the trend of achieving high financial results, we also increased our team by nearly 30%. We won the Storage Transformation Project of the Year award at the SDC awards 2021 for the project “Dustin Group replaces VMware and Hyper-V with a New-Age IT Stack powered by StorPool”. This award was another recognition for StorPool, for our unique team and our efforts to do things the right way.
In 2020, StorPool also won the Software Defined Storage (SDS) Vendor of the Year at the prestigious 2020 Storage Awards, which confirmed our position as a world market leader in storage solutions. In the same year, StorPool was included in the Deloitte Fast 50 Central Europe rankings – ranked among the top 50 companies with the highest revenue growth and was awarded as one of the fastest-growing IT companies in Central and Eastern Europe.
What’s next for your product?
In the future, we will conquer many more peaks. We have ambitious goals, which will make us grow, become even better, and excel in what we do. We will continue to develop our product to meet the growing needs of the market and will continue to provide a service with 100% customer satisfaction.
Learn more about StorPool Storage and how we accelerate the world by storing data more productively!