StorOne launched an effort to help customers get the best out of their flash-based storage solutions to beat the spiraling memory crunch.

Dubbed the "9x ROI on Flash Program," it pairs an existing flash tier with a lower-cost hard disk drive (HDD) tier. The vendor’s platform then manages data placement to ensure inactive (cold) data is shifted to the HDD, keeping important "hot" data running on flash.

StorOne CEO Gal Naor explained that the new program "is about breaking the flash bottleneck, providing organizations with a way to grow capacity intelligently without paying the all-flash tax."

The ongoing memory component crunch has seen prices skyrocket, with enterprises left scrambling for innovative and cost-effective ways to scale out their AI projects.

Storage vendors have sought to help plug the gap, with rivals Vast Data and Vdura having launched flash reclamation projects in which they take drives from legacy deployments and extend those non-volatile memory express (NVMe) investments for more in-demand projects.

StorOne, however, is looking at the situation less as a hardware problem, instead opting for a more software-defined architectural approach.

Enterprises leveraging its new offering can redeploy existing all-flash storage under StorOne’s software, which automatically promotes or demotes data based on live access patterns – without the need for manual intervention.

“As the founder of StorWize, we were the first to bring real-time, inline compression to enterprise storage,” Naor said. “I know both worlds extremely well. Data reduction has its place, but it is inherently dependent on the data itself. Auto-tiering works on every type of data and delivers certainty. That’s why it’s the more resilient and correct architectural approach.”

StorOne isn’t the only brand going down the software-led tiering route, with Broadcom touting NVMe tiering in its VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform as a means to beat the memory crunch.

Sabina Anja, chief technologist for Broadcom’s VCF division, recently outlined to SDxCentral that such a systems approach helps enterprises make the most out of the hardware they already have.

For StorOne, though, the new program is its latest effort to bridge the gap between traditional storage and AI infrastructure, following its partnership with Phison Electronics last summer.

The latter's aiDAPTIV+ technology was integrated directly into StorOne's storage platforms, combining what were previously separate infrastructure layers into a single system that reduces GPU memory demands during inference workloads.