Exablox

Founded in 2010, Exablox developed scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) solutions targeting the runaway storage costs and information management challenges faced by organizations. In January 2017, the company was acquired by StorageCraft Technology Corporation, a move designed to merge primary and secondary storage solutions. The acquisition integrated Exablox's hardware expertise with StorageCraft's data protection software portfolio. Douglas Brockett, who was the CEO of Exablox, became the president of StorageCraft following the transaction.

Exablox's core business centered on providing a cloud-managed, object-based storage appliance called OneBlox. This product was designed for both primary and secondary storage, serving a client base that included Fortune 500 companies, research institutions, and government entities. The company operated on a model that allowed customers to purchase the appliance and use their own commodity hard drives, significantly lowering the total cost of ownership by avoiding the markup typical of legacy storage vendors.

The flagship product, OneBlox, is a scale-out storage appliance built on an object-based file system. Its architecture enables seamless expansion by adding more drives or appliances without downtime or complex reconfiguration, presenting a single global file system. Key features include inline variable-length deduplication, compression, continuous data protection through unlimited snapshots, and multi-site replication for disaster recovery. The system was designed for ease of use, managed through a cloud-based service called OneSystem, which allowed for remote monitoring and management from any browser. OneBlox abandoned traditional RAID concepts in favor of replicating and distributing data objects across multiple drives and nodes to protect against failures. This design supported both SMB and NFS protocols, making it suitable for virtualized environments like VMware and Hyper-V.

Keywords: scale-out storage, object-based storage, network-attached storage, data protection, storage appliance, deduplication, cloud-managed storage, OneBlox, enterprise storage, data management