Onaro

About Onaro

Onaro, established in 2002, carved a niche in the enterprise software market by providing storage service management (SSM) and data center automation solutions. The company was founded by Raphael Yahalom, alongside Roy Alon and Assaf Levy, who transitioned their expertise from the Israeli Defense Forces' elite Unit 8200 to the corporate tech landscape. Headquartered in Boston, with a significant research and development presence in Israel, the firm focused on addressing the complexities of large-scale data storage.

The core of Onaro's business was its SANscreen software suite, a platform designed to give enterprises a comprehensive, service-level view of their storage infrastructure. This product enabled clients, typically large corporations with extensive data centers, to manage, monitor, and optimize their Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network-Attached Storage (NAS) systems. The software's value proposition was centered on enhancing operational efficiency by automating storage provisioning, improving capacity planning, and ensuring application availability and performance. By offering end-to-end visibility from applications down to the physical storage devices, SANscreen allowed IT departments to reduce capital expenditures on storage hardware and minimize the risk of application outages.

Onaro's journey culminated in a strategic acquisition by NetApp, a major player in the storage and data management industry, in January 2008 for approximately $120 million. The acquisition was a move by NetApp to bolster its own software portfolio, integrating Onaro's change and configuration management capabilities to provide its customers with more efficient data center management. Following the acquisition, founders Roy Alon and Assaf Levy remained with NetApp, establishing a development hub in Israel that evolved into the core of NetApp's cloud services business, where they continue to lead as Vice Presidents.