Zadara Storage Assigned Patent

Zadara Storage, Ltd announced that its CEO and co-founder, Nelson Nahum, and seven members of the company’s engineering team were awarded US Patent 8,819,230 for a “Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) service for cloud servers” in recognition of the uniqueness of the underlying technology of its enterprise storage as a service offerings for public, private and hybrid cloud storage environments.

Abstract of the patent: “A method for VPSA service for cloud users over a computer network includes receiving parameters for the VPSA over the network and creating the VPSA from resources of server computers. Creating the VPSA includes allocating and exposing drives that meets or exceeds specified drive characteristics, drive quantity, and array redundancy criteria to virtual controllers (VCs) in the VPSA, and dedicating parts of processor/memory complexes that each meets or exceeds a specified virtual controller hardware model to the VCs. The VCs run on virtual machines on the dedicated parts of processor/memory complexes on independent server computers. The VCs discover the exposed drives, create a virtual pool from the exposed virtual drives, implement data protection on the virtual pool, create volumes from the virtual pool, expose the volumes over the network to a customer computer, and handle access requests to the volumes from the customer computer.”

The patent is both seminal and broad, covering the VPSA approach for delivering and managing an on-demand storage array service which allows for dynamically creating and changing a storage array, all the while maintaining its high QoS and reliability.

At a time when the software-defined storage hype threatens to obscure reality, Zadara’s patent award further corroborates the company’s vision-which originated around the time, nearly three years ago, when the patent was filed-to marry storage virtualization and the ‘as a service’ business model to provide what customers want: elastic, scalable, remotely managed, pure-OpEx, consumption-priced IT services.

“The patent is just one of the reasons we can reassure customers that they can ‘stop buying storage,’ and I mean it,” said Nahum, who with this patent has a total of nine to his credit. “The storage market has lagged behind computing and networking in offering customer-driven business models and especially ‘as a service’ options. Customers are forced to plan far in advance and buy ‘just-in-case’ storage capacity, endure painful migrations every few years, and/or agree to leases with hefty upfront payments, large base capacities, and lengthy, restrictive terms. Zadara continues to grow rapidly quarter over quarter largely because our innovative VPSA software and business model with which, at long last, customers can buy storage the way they prefer – by not buying any storage at all, but simply sourcing storage as a service so they are free to gain the agility that lets their businesses fly high.”

Zadara is a provider of fully-managed NAS and SAN technologies in the cloud and on-premises with elasticity, high QoS, scalability, privacy and pay-as-you-go pricing. It provides the VSPA either on customer premises – via its OPaaS (On-Premise as a Service) offering for both enterprises and public cloud and MSPs – or as a pure service in public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Dimension Data, CloudSigma.