StorMagic is a company that is solving the world’s edge data problems. Pulse 2.0 interviewed StorMagic Chief Marketing and Product Officer Bruce Kornfeld to learn more about the company.
Bruce Kornfeld’s Background
What is Kornfeld’s background? Kornfeld said:
“In the span of my 30+ year career thus far, I have held leadership roles in marketing, product management, alliances and business development in the storage, server, networking and security industries. Prior to joining StorMagic as chief marketing and product officer in 2017, I held marketing and product leadership positions at Compellent, Dell and NCR. I helped Compellent grow its revenue from $9 million to more than $150 million, which led to its IPO and eventual sale to Dell for $960M and was instrumental in building and growing Dell’s first storage division to over $1 billion.”
Formation Of StorMagic
How did the idea for StorMagic come together? Kornfeld shared:
“Our founders had a goal to simplify storage for customers at the edge and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Over the years, we’ve built our reputation on this mantra and are proud to say that we have thousands of customers around the world that use our technology to run their applications at small sites with 100% uptime.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Kornfeld’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Kornfeld reflected:
“While we are a smaller company relative to our primary competitors, we have a reputation for ‘punching above our weight class’ and having a very strong position in the market. A couple of years ago, Gartner analysts moved StorMagic from “Niche” on the Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure to ‘Visionary.’ That was a big move for the company and opened the eyes of more customers, partners (and competitors)!”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Kornfeld explained:
“Our core product is SvSAN, a hyperconverged storage software that eliminates downtime and provides cost-effective high availability with only two servers.”
“SvSAN is simple, flexible and reliable. It enables users to attain lightweight high availability from a solution that has minimal hardware requirements and is easy to deploy and manage. SvSAN can use any x86 server and storage configuration and maintains 100% uptime, keeps data secure, and protects against disasters. All of this is delivered in a very small footprint and can cost as little as $8,000.”
“StorMagic recently introduced SvHCI, a full-stack HCI solution purpose-built for edge and SMB environments and includes StorMagic’s in-house 24x7x365 customer support. SvHCI combines SvSAN with a hypervisor and virtual networking to meet today’s critical customer demands.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Kornfeld and the team face in building the company? Kornfeld acknowledged:
“Our main product (SvSAN) works with any hypervisor but the main one customers use is VMware (now Broadcom). A few years after we launched, they came out with their own virtual storage product to compete with us and they named it vSAN.”
“While it’s always challenging for the small company to compete with ‘the big guys’ with the huge marketing budgets, it’s also a lot of fun. We have kept to our original mantra of simple, flexible and reliable and because of our focus on small sites and edge customers we save them a lot of money on infrastructure costs and beat VMware/Broadcom most of the time.”
Evolution Of StorMagic’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Kornfeld noted:
“Over the years, we expanded our hypervisor support so that we now work with all three major players – VMware by Broadcom vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Linux KVM. We’ve also advanced our management tools to make our product even easier to monitor and manage. In fact, late last year we launched our first centralized management product for thousands of sites called Edge Control.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Kornfeld cited:
- 2024: StorMagic announced SvHCI, a full-stack HCI solution that includes SvSAN, a hypervisor and virtual networking, and is the ideal replacement solution for Broadcom/VMware.
- 2023: We successfully launched our newest Software as a Service (SaaS) tool, Edge Control. Making our storage monitoring and management software tools available to customers – based on their demand and at no charge – was a timely and notable achievement for us.
- 2020: Introduced SvKMS data encryption key management solution, an enterprise-grade key management system that can be integrated in the datacenter, edge or cloud.
- 2020: Strategic partner HPE began selling SvSAN as a replacement for its StoreVirtual platform, which was discontinued in 2019.
- 2018: SvSAN 6.2 was released, and with it a new FIPS 140-2 compliant data encryption feature.
- 2017: StorMagic secured a patent for “Systems and methods for caching data”.
- 2011: StorMagic secured two patents for “Method and system for data replication”.
- 2009: SvSAN was introduced in 2009 as a virtual SAN software-defined storage solution designed for edge computing environments.
- 2007: Introduced its first product in 2007, the SM Series, a software-based iSCSI SAN.
- 2006: StorMagic was founded with a goal to create products to simplify IT for customers.
Customer Success Stories
After asking Kornfeld about customer success stories, he highlighted:
- Giant Eagle (retail) chose StorMagic SvSAN and SvKMS to improve uptime and add encryption at more than 200 in-store pharmacies.
- Galenica Senese (healthcare) reduced CapEx by 50% and increased uptime with StorMagic SvSAN.
- Eugen Forschner GmbH (manufacturing) eliminated downtime with StorMagic SvSAN.
- Sheetz Inc. (retail) standardized on SvSAN to optimize systems at 680 convenience stores.
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Kornfeld assessed:
“Depending on the analyst you talk to, the numbers differ slightly. However, the edge computing market is over $200 billion today and is growing at a 20%+ CAGR.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Kornfeld affirmed:
“Unlike our competitors, who try to overcome the differences in small and edge environments by forcing customers to adopt over-provisioned datacenter-class solutions, we have specifically designed our software for demanding environments where resources, space, and budgets are limited. Our product strategy is to deliver the simplest, yet most advanced edge data software solutions so customers can store, protect, and manage their data at and from the edge.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Kornfeld concluded:
“We continue to invest in growing our business in three areas. Our products are sold in over 70 countries around the world, but we don’t have in-country sales and marketing resources in all of them – so we’re always looking to expand coverage around the world. Secondly, we are a 100 percent channel organization and continue to grow our network of distributors, VARs and OEMs to support these regions. Lastly, on the product front, we are working to expand our support for more hypervisors since many customers are trying to move away from VMware and we’re developing even more management capabilities to make large-scale deployments even easier for our customers.”
