Zadara Rolls Out Virtual Private Storage Array Service

Zadara Storage, Inc. unveiled a release of its Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) service that makes unified SAN and NAS cloud storage.

The enterprise suite is a platform upgrade that adds data centre-grade SAN and NAS features that were unavailable in the cloud and that are deployed by users today. Backed by the features, the company, through its colocation arrangement in partnership with service providers such as AWS, Equinix and Dimension Data, becomes the first storage company to support tier 1 primary storage for low latency, high IO/s applications such as databases and CRM in the cloud on dedicated drives, using virtual controllers and separated networking. These features are purchased and deployed by the hour, as a private or hybrid cloud, dedicated colocation solution, or service provider offering.

As organizational executives seek cloud economics without the downsides of either cloud storage (lack of QoS and granular control) or traditional enterprise storage (high cost and inflexibility), the VPSA allows organizations to have it all, without compromise. Using it, organizations can achieve both cloud scale and cloud economics, with the HA, clustering, privacy, predictability and control they expect from on-premise traditional hardware purchases.

“This is as revolutionary as it gets with enterprise storage,” said Bernie Velivis, cloud infrastructure and services manager, Roadnet Technologies, Inc. a provider of vehicle routing and scheduling software based in Towson MD, and a Zadara customer that has been using the suite. “Typically I/O is the bottleneck with cloud storage but with Zadara we achieved our demanding I/O goals and avoided the 1TB volume limit of major cloud storage solutions. Thanks to the VPSA Enterprise Suite we provisioned a far more elegant file storage deployment with dedicated drives and a powerful, dedicated management interface as well. The solution provides for file sharing across multiple servers providing a highly available and scalable cloud solution. We got up and running fast and have guaranteed throughput thanks to multi-tenancy done right: we have found no one else who can support NFS at this scale. The performance is rock solid and lets us assemble the building blocks for our specific needs, on an as-a-service basis, so that we can scale both capacity and performance up or down as requirements change.”

It adds support for features formerly available from dedicated, on-premise hardware including low-impact snapshots with R/W clones, SSD R/W cache, thin provisioning and remote asynchronous replication. With these features, storage administrators enjoy a higher degree of granular control with a range of HA, low-latency applications with elasticity:

• Data protection options including snapshots, clones and remote mirrors for enhanced

• Low-impact snapshots for data protection and recovery

• Customized snapshot creation policies, allowing users to create data protection policies tailored to their specific business requirements

• Remote mirroring for DR and multi-geography collaboration

• Repository storage with performance, for those big data and media needs that fall in the middle ground between primary active and archival storage, using the large repository drives colocated at AWS data centres around the world.

Through its footprint – the company’s SaaS offering is available in AWS US East and US West, AWS Japan and AWS Europe, as well as at Equinix and Dimension Data cloud (formerly OpSource) data centres in the US – the company allows customers to assemble their storage configuration like building blocks. IT managers choose the drives and controllers they need, and provision and change them online in minutes – managing them from a private management console.

“First it was the server business, then it was networking, and now the staid world of storage is being shaken up with dramatically better paradigms driven by the cloud,” said Ben Woo, storage industry analyst and principal, Neuralytix. “Zadara’s offering addresses a corner of the market for primary storage in the cloud that no one else has touched to date, with As a Service features that make anyone who knows storage do a double-take. This is definitely a company to watch.”

“For years cloud storage was relegated to backup or archive, with the prevailing opinion that high-IO/s, mission-critical applications had to stay on costly, on-premise hardware or necessitated a rewrite in order to run in the cloud, which obviated any time- and cost-savings,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO, Zadara. “With the debut of the VPSA Enterprise Suite, organizations can achieve the same data centre-grade reliability, performance and control yet access the tremendous advantages of cloud cost and flexibility. We removed compromise from the equation by offering the single-tenant experience customers want at the multi-tenant price they need.“