StorOne unveiled Version 4.0 of its flagship platform, enabling enterprises to pool existing third-party all-flash arrays as a high-speed execution tier sitting directly on top of cheaper storage.

Version 4.0 would essentially allow IT departments to allocate unused space from active, third-party offerings directly into the StorOne tiering system, a potential boon for cost-conscious operators looking to navigate the memory crunch.

StorOne bills the addition to its flagship platform as such, claiming flash now costs around 15-times more than hard-disk drives (HDD). To beat elongated lead times and increasing costs, the vendor wants customers to maximize the value of infrastructure assets they already own.

The update would see customers allocate a portion of their flash capacity to StorOne Real-Time Tiering volumes, while StorOne-managed HDD capacity would serve as the lower -cost capacity tier, with the two operating together.

The vendor claims that balancing active and inactive blocks across storage tiers via Version 4.0 provides nine-times more value from existing all-flash storage capacity.

The memory crisis continues to bite, with hardware manufacturers pushing lead times out as far as 2028, while raking in the cash from intense customer demand. Flash memory vendor Everpure (formerly Pure Storage), for example, defended price rises amid claims it was profiteering from the crunch after its prices had jumped around 70% since the beginning of the year.

StorOne has sought to position its offerings as a means to beat the shortage, with the firm having launched a program back in February that sought to break the flash bottleneck by pairing existing flash tiers with lower-cost HDDs.

“I’ve had the privilege of helping drive one major shift in enterprise storage before. At Storwize, we challenged the belief that primary storage couldn’t deliver meaningful capacity reduction, and the industry eventually embraced that change,” StorOne CEO Gal Naor noted. “Today, we’re at a similar inflection point, challenging another long-held assumption: that the answer to growing storage demand is buying more flash. It isn’t. As flash becomes more constrained and more expensive, organizations need to get dramatically more value from the flash they already own.”