In a Nutshell – Open-E in 2023

2023 was the year when Open-E reached an important port, from where it sailed into more expansive waters. The company has been in existence for 25 years, so it was 12 months of summing up, reflecting, but also celebrating, joyful and touching memories. However, we have not slowed down. Our calendar was filled with a mass of events in which we participated, our product continues to develop, and our collaborations allow us to achieve goals that, for some, are unattainable. So, let’s stop for a moment and recall the most important facts about Open-E in 2023.

25th Anniversary

25 years is a long time. Starting the Open-E company was a first step, but not the hardest. Overcoming challenges, pushing forward technological ideas, and bringing them to life with the product customers find attractive, helpful, and reliable in their business – that was a long and steep mountain to climb. But we made it. Of course, it could not be done by ourselves. We have met wonderful, inspiring people and had a chance to work with them, learning from each other, and providing solutions that combine steady, solid software that can be the basis for various companies’ data storage infrastructure.

And for that, we would like to say – thank you!

We received wishes from our marvelous partners. The whole company, people from all around the globe working for Open-E, spent time together to celebrate this great event and look back to recall the most important, touching moments from our history. This was an awesome anniversary party and a perfect moment to look to the future and think about where we’re going and what our next goals are.

25th Anniversary Open-E

Awards

It was a great honor for us to win awards at international industry competitions.

• Open-E has been awarded in the SDC Awards 2023 in the Storage Transformation Project of the Year category!
  This award is the result of a remarkable project undertaken in collaboration with Open-E’s Platinum Partner, Abacus Electric. Their exceptional commitment led to the successful creation of a system that helps Post Bellum collect and preserve memories for future generations. We would also like to say “Thank you” to Jan Petrak, whose special commitment played a key role in making this project a reality.

• Open-E has also been awarded in the DCS Awards 2023 in the Data Centre ICT Storage Innovation of the Year category!
  Open-E was honored with an award for the update of our software, Open-E JovianDSS Up29r2. This update brought forth a number of groundbreaking features, including

• • compatibility with the ATTO FastFrame N312 card, 
  • support for RDMA, 
  • the ability to work with Self-Encrypting Drives, 
  • improved data integrity

among other enhancements.

Events

The Open-E Team traveled thousands of kilometers for an intense and enthusiastic time spent at various events. We met a mass of familiar faces, colleagues, and representatives of partners, but we also met new people with whom we could exchange opinions and talk about the data storage challenges and thus learn from each other. These events were:

• Cloudfest (March 18 – 21 in Rust, Germany)
• NAB Show (April 15 – 19 In Las Vegas, USA)
• Share Distribuzione SRLs Storage Day (June 8 in Milan, October 12 in Rome, Italy)
• Boston Days (July 6 in Munich, Germany)
• IBC (15 – 18 September in Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• No Time for Downtime by Maguay (October 25 in Bucharest, Romania)
• Toshiba Roadshow Middle East: Build Your Own Data Centre that included:
  • September 12 in Dubai, UAE
  • September 19 in Kuwait
  • October 2 in Riyadh, KSA
  • November 16 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In addition to knowledge and intriguing insights, we brought back many warm memories of the places where these events took place. We are grateful that we could visit such a great big hunk of the world and meet such friendly and brilliant people. It’s great to be a part of it!

Webinars

It was a great opportunity to share our knowledge and fun to organize and attend a couple of insightful webinars:

• On March 9, Patryk Jurkiewicz, our sales representative, talked about challenges and prospects for storage solutions in the medical industry in the webinar organized by Stovaris company.
• On May 24, specialists from our partner firms – Atto, Western Digital, and our own team, engaged in discussions about data center architectures that prioritize high-capacity, high-performance storage solutions with effortless backup.
• On July 12, we took part in the webinar organized by Toshiba Gulf FZE and our Qatar partner Velocity Technology. We have focused on taking control of the data storage infrastructure, avoiding vendor lock-in, and leveraging the collaborative power of Toshiba, Open-E, and Velocity Technology.
• On November 16, with Manuel Kuss representing Optima Packaging, we had a chance to talk about the concept of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, its features, and how it improves the performance and efficiency of the business.

Cooperation with Partners

In 2023, we had the opportunity to certify a range of the products from our technological partners and thus confirm their compatibility with our system:

• Toshiba Electronics Europe Storage Solutions MG10ACA20TE HDD

In 2023, we tested and certified Toshiba MG10ACA20TE HDD in both Single-Node and High-Availability Cluster configurations to ensure its reliability for various data storage architectures and applications. It has demonstrated superior performance across various domains, durability, speed, and reliability, making it ideal for settings that demand high storage capacity, data accuracy, and constant availability. As we expected, it proved to be a reliable and high-performance hardware component with excellent speed and consistency, making it suitable for environments that require high data integrity, capacity, and availability, which is essential for enterprise companies.

• ATTO FastFrame N312 100 GbE NIC

The ATTO FastFrame N312 network adapter underwent extensive testing to confirm its complete functional compatibility with Open-E JovianDSS. The testing process considered both Single node and HA cluster operations. The results showed no abnormalities, demonstrated good performance, and revealed no compatibility issues.

• AIC J2024-06-35X JBOD

The AIC J2024-06-35X JBOD is a storage enclosure compatible with both SAS and SATA Drives. It can accommodate up to 24 disks, supporting speeds of 12Gb/s and 6Gb/s for SAS and SATA, respectively. Based on the test results, our experts confirmed that this JBOD is an excellent hardware choice for applications such as virtualization, AI, research & development, high-performance computing, testing environments, distributed solutions, and collaborative work.

Trainings and Courses

In July, we enjoyed teaching about data storage with the Open-E Certified Engineer Training with Thomas-Krenn.AG, which is a great partner and a leading provider of custom server systems, supported us in this event. This would not have been possible without them. They are not only professional and reliable in the business and provide great assistance, but they are also kind and cordial in our interactions! The training was not only about exchanging knowledge but insights on data storage topics as well. Thank you Thomas-Krenn Team!

We have also launched a new series of training courses to professionally introduce data storage enthusiasts to ZFS, the open-source file system on which our software architecture is based. The ZFS Data Storage for Beginners course takes you through the basics of ZFS-based data storage and the characteristics of the storage system in terms of capacity, data redundancy, integrity, and security. In addition, it teaches how to plan the required number of data disks (based on the specified data storage capacity), data redundancy, and security levels.

Case Studies

• Open-E, Starline, and CKNS MAKE RADIOLOGY SHINE – Excellent Team Work of Data Storage Experts

The BoRad group medical practice, which offers specialized services in radiology, nuclear medicine, and radiotherapy treatments, encountered a challenge in managing the growing requirements for efficient and secure data storage. To address this, their IT service provider, CKNS-Dienstleistungen GmbH, sought the assistance of Starline Computer, a German data storage solutions provider. Starline Computer employed Open-E JovianDSS in their project, aiming to achieve high availability, scalability, excellent performance, data protection, and cost-effectiveness.

Read the case study here.

• Starline’s High-Availability Open-E JovianDSS Based Solution for BRANDGUARDIAN

BRANDGUARDIAN, a worldwide solutions provider for brand management, made the decision to construct an extra data storage appliance to supplement its existing system. The new solution needed to encompass High Availability, mirroring, thin provisioning, and deduplication. The deployment of the new data storage configuration, which was based on Open-E JovianDSS, provided an upgraded set of options that were already present in Open-E DSS V7, in addition to introducing numerous new features that enhanced data storage reliability. The most significant of these was Open-E JovianDSS On- & Off-Site Data Protection.

Read the case study here.

• Nfina’s Hybrid Cloud Open-E JovianDSS-Based Solutions for Vidsys Corporation

Vidys Corporation, a subsidiary of ARES Security and a global front runner in delivering enterprise security solutions, required a data storage solution that ensured an effective and appropriate backup. However, there were additional goals to be met, including high performance, low latency, advanced data protection, a favorable price-performance ratio, and geo-redundancy. After evaluating a variety of products in the market, Vidsys approached Nfina Technologies, a trusted partner of Open-E, and presented a challenge. Together, we proposed a solution that handles a vast amount of data, synchronizes the entire infrastructure, offers the benefits of a public cloud at a reasonable cost, minimizes downtime to the lowest possible level, and results in monthly savings of approximately $12,600.

Read the case study here.

• To Save the Memories for Future Generations

This is our SDC-awarded project made for Post Bellum, a non-governmental organization from Czechia, who sought a customized  storage solution. The organization had specific requirements: a scale-up architecture, easy capacity expansion based on financial resources, commodity, non-proprietary hardware without vendor lock-in, the ability to use a cluster data storage solution, and support for snapshot and cloud services. The new data storage infrastructure provided by Abacus Electric, a data storage vendor, included two single-node servers for superior performance and virtually limitless scalability. This infrastructure was managed by OpenE JovianDSS with its ZFS-based architecture, and it supported storage capacities that could handle dozens of PBs of data.

Read the case study here.

Other activities

We have also issued a number of different publications, including:

• 31 blog posts,
• 5 brochures:
  • Beyond Backup: Understanding the Data Protection
  • Open-E JovianDSS Accelerates Your Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
  • How to Store and Manage CCTV and Surveillance Video Data with Open-E JovianDSS
  • The Best Data Storage Solutions for MSP Business
  • Open-E DSS V7 End-of-Life Brochure
• videos on our YouTube channel:
  • People of Open-E that focuses on Open-E Team
  • new video series regarding our company’s 25th anniversary
  • tutorials and demos about Open-E JovianDSS features
  • hardware certification videos
• and a couple of funny videos on our social media channels referring to Password Protection Day and CyberSecurity Month. We have launched our Tik Tok channel, which is great fun to explore and create content for!

Open-E DSS V7 End-of-Life

We have decided to finish supporting Open-E DSS V7. The product that you have been using and loving for years is reaching its end of life on November 1, 2024. This means that you will not be able to buy any licenses or get any software updates from Open-E after this date. We are discontinuing Open-E DSS V7 because we want to focus on our ZFS-based product, which delivers better performance, reliability, and scalability for data storage solutions – Open-E JovianDSS, a high-end ZFS- and Linux-based data storage software for enterprise environments. Open-E DSS V7 was one of our best-selling and well-received data storage products, admired by customers and data storage specialists across the globe. The system earned many data storage market accolades, such as the Storage Insider Readers’ Choice Award 2019 and the IT Professional Product of the Year 2018.

You can switch to Open-E JovianDSS on profitable terms, which we strongly advise. The upgraded software works with most of the hardware and software platforms that Open-E DSS V7 supports, and it also offers advanced features that the previous product generation does not have.

We’re in this business together!

As you can see, we’ve done a lot in these 12 months. It was a time of learning, making new friendships, embracing new experiences, deployments, collaborations, and celebration. It’s proof that, as of last year, we keep up with one of the most essential mottos in the Open-E company –

BUSINESS IS BETTER TOGETHER!