StorPool: quietly challenging established vendors

When StorPool co‑founder and CEO Boyan Ivanov talks about Bulgaria’s technology heritage, he does so with a mixture of pride and pragmatism. The country, he says, has long produced deep technical talent, even if it has rarely been recognised as a global centre for commercial software. “People don’t know this, but Bulgaria used to be the Silicon Valley of the Eastern bloc,” he explains. “We had factories doing civil production during the day and military and high‑end IT equipment during the night.” That legacy, he says, created a generation of engineers whose skills were shaped by necessity, scarcity and ingenuity.

StorPool’s own team reflects that lineage. Ivanov describes second‑ and third‑generation developers whose parents worked on punch‑card systems and whose own careers began in competitive informatics. The company, founded in 2011, has built its storage platform almost entirely from this domestic engineering base. What it has not built, at least not yet, is the global brand recognition enjoyed by US‑based storage vendors. Ivanov is frank about that imbalance. Bulgaria, he says, is strong in engineering but “not as well known in sales and marketing and bringing products to market globally as our friends in the US.”

Yet StorPool has grown steadily, if quietly, into a profitable, founder‑owned business with customers in more than 30 countries. It now supports infrastructure used by more than a million end users through service providers and enterprises. The company does not disclose revenue, but Ivanov confirms it is in the “two‑digit millions” and “on the way to three digits,” with year‑on‑year growth of around 15% and rising. For a bootstrapped storage software vendor, that trajectory is unusual. “We are not spending somebody else’s money,” he says. “We’re actually having a very healthy business.”

A platform built for demanding workloads

StorPool positions itself as a high‑performance, highly reliable, linearly scalable block storage software platform delivered as a managed service. Ivanov describes it as “Amazon EBS on your premises,” a comparison intended to highlight both the consumption model and the operational approach. The company deploys, monitors, patches and upgrades customer environments remotely, aiming to remove the operational burden that typically sits with storage administrators or partners.

The platform has been in production since 2012 and is used primarily by service providers such as hosting companies, cloud providers, MSPs, IaaS platforms and SaaS vendors. Around 10% of its footprint sits in large enterprises with their own IT teams. StorPool’s strongest use cases are mission‑critical workloads: databases, large virtualised environments and latency‑sensitive applications. The company claims measured availability of five nines across its fleet over more than a decade, a metric it emphasises as “actual measured availability, not theoretical modelling.”

StorPool’s architecture is built for transactional workloads where latency is the defining metric. Typical deployments, the team says, deliver sub‑100‑microsecond latency, with clusters scaling to tens of millions of IOPS and throughput in the range of 100–200GB/s on a 20‑node system, dependent on hardware. The company stresses that customers rarely need such extremes, but the headroom is intended to remove the need for performance planning. “Whatever load they throw at the system, it will handle it,” says Ivanov.

Scalability is another focus. StorPool clusters can start as small as 10TB and scale online to more than 50PB without downtime. Hardware refreshes, expansions, updates and lifecycle operations are designed to be non‑disruptive. The company says that this “always‑on” design reflects how modern service providers operate: continuous workloads, no maintenance windows and infrastructure that must evolve without interruption.

The platform includes multiple protocols such as block, file and NVMe/TCP, and supports several performance tiers, from high‑end transactional workloads to lower‑cost tiers used for backup and disaster recovery. StorPool also includes its own backup and DR engine, called VolumeCare, and a suite of analytics and monitoring tools. Integrations exist for VMware, OpenStack, Kubernetes and other virtualisation and orchestration platforms.

The company’s managed‑service model is unusual in the storage market, where most vendors rely on partners or customer teams to operate systems. StorPool’s approach is closer to hyperscaler design, where storage is delivered as a service rather than as a product. “Amazon EBS is a fully managed storage solution,” Ivanov notes. “We are giving the tools for everybody who is not Amazon to replicate that design in their own data centres.”

But what happened to the hype around software‑defined storage? A decade ago, SDS was considered a disruptive force. Many vendors emerged, many disappeared, and the term itself faded from industry conversation. Ivanov and his team say that SDS did not vanish; it simply became normalised. “It’s just not hyped anymore. A lot of clouds use Ceph, but it’s not cool. You’re not writing articles about it.”

The more immediate market force, however, is VMware. The company’s licensing changes under Broadcom have triggered widespread concern among customers and partners, particularly those facing steep price increases. StorPool sees this as the most significant infrastructure shift in years. “VMware has over 300,000 customers,” Ivanov says. “If they increase the price ten times, then you’re out of business. You don’t have enough margin to avoid going bankrupt.”

He describes a growing urgency among mid‑market and enterprise customers to find alternatives. Many, he says, are not looking to redesign applications or move to public cloud, both of which require major architectural changes. Instead, they want a stable, on‑premises virtualisation stack at a fair cost, with full support and minimal complexity. “They have a business to run,” he says. “They don’t want to assemble five different pieces. They want something that works end-to-end.”

StorPool expects this shift to accelerate. Some customers are already migrating; others are evaluating options. The company believes the market will see a “tidal wave” of change as organisations reassess their infrastructure strategies.

A European vendor with global ambitions

StorPool operates with a team of around 60 people split between Bulgaria and the United States. It remains founder‑owned after buying back investor shares, a move that Ivanov says reflects the team’s long‑term commitment. The company has earned several industry awards, including recognition for cloud storage and VMware alternatives, and has been listed among Europe’s fastest‑growing companies for three consecutive years. It also holds ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certifications.

Despite its technical strengths, StorPool’s go‑to‑market model is still evolving. The company sells directly rather than through a large partner ecosystem, though it does work with vendors such as HPE and Oracle in specific contexts. Ivanov acknowledges that the company’s ambition is not to serve every use case. “We want to be the best‑in‑class storage solution for something,” he says. “Which means it’s not a solution for many other things.”

That clarity of focus may prove advantageous as the market shifts. Service providers and enterprises facing rising costs, performance demands, and architectural change are looking for alternatives that combine reliability, scale and operational simplicity. StorPool believes its managed‑service model and technical depth position it well for that moment.

Whether the company can convert its engineering pedigree into broader market visibility remains to be seen. But as Ivanov points out, the fundamentals of the storage market are changing. Data volumes continue to grow, workloads are increasingly automated, and customers expect infrastructure to behave like cloud services even when deployed on‑premises. In that environment, StorPool’s quiet, methodical approach may resonate more strongly than the hype cycles that once defined the SDS conversation.