Zadara StaaS Solution Adds Support for Azure Cloud

Zadara Storage, Inc. announced the availability of its enterprise cloud storage as a service (STaaS) for the Microsoft Azure public cloud platform.

Already deployed at select US sites via Azure’s ExpressRoute high-bandwidth, high QoS, low latency network connection, the service offers expanded possibility to Microsoft Azure users: the ability to run enterprise IaaS workloads on file (NFS and CIFS) and block (iSCSI) storage with the performance, consistency and privacy of single-tenant solutions – at multitenant scale and pricing.

At the same time, the support for Azure makes the features of the platform available to Zadara’s users.

This represents what the company believes is an industry first – a multi-cloud capable SAN and NAS as a service offering that frees IT managers to provision and deploy once to the platform, and then to attach the same storage to Azure and other public cloud offerings such as AWS. The multi-cloud capabilities in its built-for-the-cloud Virtual Private Storage Array offering enable the Azure community to support advanced applications such as SQL clusters in the cloud, remote asynchronous replication with 1-minute RPO support, SSD R/W caching, and backup/recovery and BC needs.

As multi-cloud moves from a buzzword to real-world deployment, the company’s enterprise StaaS for Azure enables enterprise applications to unleash the scalability and superior economics of the public cloud, without the hassles often associated with supporting traditional storage architectures.

“Azure ExpressRoute, offers more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies and higher security that enable deployment of high-performance, massive applications within private networks,” said Steven Martin, GM, Microsoft Azure. “We are very excited to see Zadara extend the capabilities of Azure for our mutual customers.“

With this enterprise STaaS, IT managers can deploy across the public clouds of their choosing – at Microsoft Azure or AWS – without rewrites or hassles, knowing they can access storage capabilities and stil pay with a pure OpEx model not CapEx, by the hour, without long term commitments or up-front fees. This flexibility applies even to those HA, high IO/s applications that formerly exceeded the storage capabilities of the public cloud – applications that are provisioned and run with the hallmark high QoS, low latency attachment to Azure VMs, and global footprint for which the company is famous.

The virtual private storage arrays are colocated at Equinix facilities that are designated as Azure ExpressRoute exchange sites and feature high speed fiber lines directly connected to Azure. All customers’ drives are private and not shared with anyone else, so users can obtain single-tenant performance at multitenant prices and avoid the ‘noisy neighbor’ problem (which occurs in competing services when other customers degrade storage performance). Expansion to more drives, adjusting Azure ExpressRoute’s bandwidth to VMs, or switching from disks to SSDs is as simple as clicking a button on the online management interface provided to each customer. At any time users can also eliminate drives, adjust controller performance, and fine tune other storage needs on the fly – allowing agility and control in a pay-as-you-go model.

“Now Microsoft Azure-based enterprises can have it all – elastic, high-QoS NAS and SAN for their most demanding applications, made affordable, highly performant, and available worldwide by Zadara’s proven storage as a service offering,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO, Zadara.