Zadara Storage is a USA company (with a Research & Development Center in Israel) with a unique approach at the storage: their solution is an enterprise-class Storage-as-a-service (STaaS). The company’s as-a-service model offers enterprises, SMBs and startups a flexible, agile and cost-efficient storage infrastructure, available on-premises and through public cloud providers.
There is a wide range of worldwide cloud and colocation providers, including value-added relationships with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. And now available also through Cloudreach’s Cloud Platform offering.
The company’s patented, software-defined Virtual Private Storage Arrays (VPSA) deliver flexible, multi-tenant enterprise SAN and NAS technology for peta-scale primary and secondary storage. With isolated resources, data security, management control and predictable performance, VPSAs meet the most stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs), even in public cloud deployments.
I’ve met Noam Shendar (VP Business Development) during the last Powering The Cloud event and I’ve got the opportunity to learn more about their approach.
The Zadara Storage Cloud is implemented by the Virtual Private Storage Arrays and take advantage of its scale-out, multi-tenant architecture.
The Zadara Storage cloud is based on commody hardware that are the Storage Nodes (the cloud can be deployed with as few as two storage nodes and scale elastically to 100s of nodes) and also includes 40Gb switches and the cables. On the software part it’s used Ubuntu Linux with KVM and OpenStack for the management of the entire infrastructure (the management VM are inside the storage itself on two separated nodes).
But the most interesting and unique aspect is who manage the storage: Zadara engineers will manage all the storage infrastructure part and customer can simple use the storage’s services! Hardware certification and HCL, upgrade, patching, maintenance… all activities that are just at the provider side!
And you can have different type of scenarios:
- On-Premise as a Service (OPaaS) for a private cloud implementation
- Public cloud, to improve your public cloud services by giving a better storage solution or just migrate some services to a public provider
The solution itself could become interesting also for future services: due to the hyperconverged nature of the architecture could be possible run services on the top of the storage nodes. Actually I don’t see any announce from this point of view and, in my opinion, more that try to run KVM based VM could be more interesting see if will be possible run containers.