Enterprise Cloud Storage From Start-Up Zetta

Cloud Storage service provider Zetta, Inc. announces the commercial availability of its enterprise-class on-demand NAS, opening up a new solution for enterprise IT storage buyers. Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage enables businesses to quickly adopt storage-as-a-service without expensive or risky changes to their current IT environments.

   Native File System, System Architecture

LiveOps provides cloud computing-based contact center platform and services to hundreds of companies in both direct response and enterprise markets that rely on the company’s technology for delivering a superior customer service experience.

“One of the value propositions of the cloud computing model is scalability, which is why we decided to work with fellow cloud computing company Zetta on this pilot project to address some of our current needs for on-demand video storage,” said Gary Slater, VP of Network Operations at LiveOps. “Zetta’s cloud storage is highly complementary to our own cloud based applications giving us flexibility and performance to best serve our customers while saving us the overhead of in-house storage hosting and management.”

With a laser focus on enterprise customer requirements, Zetta has developed its technology and service infrastructures to solve the problems of delivering data integrity, performance, and security at massive scale, leading to accelerating acceptance. Over the past year, Zetta has hosted three oversubscribed rounds of successful private beta tests and has stored and served data across multiple industries including manufacturing, media, technology, education, legal and financial services and across multiple applications including primary data, archiving, and backup.

Survey Says
A recent cloud storage survey of enterprise customers with multiple terabytes of data to mange shows that over half either already are or are anticipating implementing cloud storage. Perceived barriers, however, have made users cautious. The most commonly cited concerns are: security and privacy (49%); unpredictable costs (31%); data integrity and protection (28%); and reliability and availability (26%). Zetta is able to directly address these issues and in most cases provides solutions that are better than an enterprise could ever afford to do on its own.

“Enterprise organizations are grappling with an ongoing explosion of unstructured data. This growth, combined with increasing pressures to reduce capital and operating expenses, are leading many enterprise customers to take a serious look at online storage options,” said Brad Nisbet, program manager, storage and data management services at IDC. “Zetta’s Enterprise Cloud Storage offers a solution that can augment, and in some cases, even replace the function of on-premise primary storage for tier-2 unstructured data with the business advantages of an on-demand model.”

One Fifth the Cost
The burdened cost of owning and operating enterprise-class storage far exceeds the initial purchase price. When costs to research, negotiate, buy, install, provision, manage, power and cool, support, and backup and protect data are all taken into account, the monthly burdened cost of enterprise storage can range from several dollars per gigabyte per month(GB/month) to as much as three or four dollars per GB/month for a comparable level of data protection, security and availability. Starting at only $.25 per GB/month with discounts for longer term or additional space commitments, the economies of Zetta’s full-service enterprise-class offering are a game changing reduction.

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“Our customers are looking for our guidance and a cost-effective, easy-to-implement cloud storage solution for their traditional IT data,” said Dean Cappellazzo, CEO of Bedrock Technology Partners. “Zetta has made cloud storage easy for our enterprise customers and easy for us as their partner.”

Broad Acceptance
Driving the initial requirements for and acceptance of on-demand enterprise storage are consistent and increasingly common challenges facing IT departments including datacenter capacity limitations; complex and costly migrations; and inefficient data protection processes and technologies. These challenges lead to increased costs, increased IT workloads and ultimately to the risk of data unavailability and increased potential for data loss. Customers are striving for ways to solve these challenges that can fit into their existing IT infrastructure with no additional investment and no change to their applications, processes or growth plans.

At a fast-growing Internet service company, customer data growth far exceeded their plans. While good news for their business, it radically accelerated their data center infrastructure expansion needs. Rather than building a new data center or contracting for new managed space, both lengthy and expensive alternatives, they looked to Zetta to store nearly three quarters of a petabyte of primary data in a storage bursting or overflow application. Two features were especially critical to making this rapid move. One was the ability for Zetta to seamlessly interface with the customer’s existing storage protocols so no application reprogramming was required. The second was the ability to establish a high-speed connection supporting multi-terabyte per day data uploads to the Zetta cloud.

Higher educational institutions, research organizations and other information intensive organizations, often faced with capital constraints, can find a quick, cost-effective solution with an on-demand service. And with enterprise features and compatibility supported by Zetta, workloads can easily be moved to the Zetta cloud. At UCLA Computer Science department, an antiquated tape-based backup infrastructure is being replaced by an active archive of their data to the Zetta cloud. The new functionality was straightforward to implement with Zetta’s standard file transfer (FTP) and file access (NFS) protocols.

At one of Silicon Valley’s largest law firms, migrating more than 25 terabytes of data off an old WORM archive system to a newer more flexible online storage infrastructure was the imperative. After examining both on-premise and other cloud offerings, it became apparent that the Zetta cloud delivered both the reliability and off-premise security as well as the standard IT interfaces and access protocols required to migrate, store and protect the firm’s data.

Enterprise Cloud Storage Defined
Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage is the first service of its kind, purpose-built to be a primary storage platform for businesses with growing data storage needs. Unlike many first-generation cloud storage services with object store orientations, Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage offers:

• Standards-based, plug-and-play integration — no need to reprogram your storage interfaces, existing applications already work.
• Best-in-class data protection, integrity, security and privacy — by default, Zetta provides data encryption, logical service segregation and data thumbprints.
• Better-than-enterprise data availability — three-way data parity protection and multiple levels of integrity checking provide four to five orders of magnitude better data protection than on-premise equipment.
• Guaranteed quality of service — service and data availability and performance are guaranteed with remedies.
• Full featured snapshots — for point-in-time data versioning and recovery from accidental changes or deletions.
• Scalable connection options — choose between WAN, dedicated private circuits and in-datacenter cross-connects to match bandwidth and latency requirements.

Zetta provides all of this in a cost-efficient, pay-as-you-use model. “Once customers understand the features we’ve built into the Zetta cloud, they really start to lean forward,” said Jeff Treuhaft, CEO of Zetta. “They get near instant access, using their existing protocols, to petabytes of enterprise storage with equal or better protection and security features than are generally available in their own data center. They can focus on unlocking the value of their data not just protecting it and can redeploy scarce capital assets to other projects.”

A Team Known
for Data Storage Experience and Innovation
Zetta’s innovative cloud storage architecture was conceived and developed by Zetta’s founders, a unique blend of experienced storage infrastructure operators and distributed computing IP developers. The Zetta team has prior experience building and operating multi-petabyte enterprise storage infrastructures. They have also been responsible for early commercialization of the web through some of the Internet’s best known distributed computing standards including: HTTP Cookies, SSL, HTTP Proxying, Server Push and Global Load Balancing.

Availability and Pricing
Now commercially available to businesses, Zetta has been live and operational, storing real world data since late 2008. At a fraction the cost of buying, installing, managing, supporting, and protecting on-premise storage, Zetta pricing begins at $.25 per gigabyte per month for a minimum of one terabyte with discounts for longer term or additional space commitments. Multiple bandwidth options are available, including a simple $0.10 per gigabyte transferred or a 95th percentile metered rate of $9/Mb. There is no charge for moving new data footprint into the Zetta Cloud.