Maybe someday every application will run in a cloud-ready, NOSQL environment from the start. But for now there are millions of legacy applications that businesses would like to move to the cloud. The problem is that the basic storage services that Amazon provides are too limited, from both a performance and data services perspective, to host these applications. Enterprises need to have primary storage available to them in the EC2 Architecture.
Zadara with their Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) solution fills this gap by providing the on-premise performance and features that IT managers expect in a cloud instance. As you can see from the screen shot below, essentially Zadara provides SAN and NAS ‘by the hour’.
Quality Multi-Tenant Storage
The key differentiator for Zadara is that they provide a quality multi-tenant storage environment in the cloud. When you “build” your storage system you define how many processing cores, the number physical storage devices, what type of devices and how much RAM will be allocated to your instance. From that point on those resources are dedicated to your application, giving you the ultimate in quality of service that’s essential for mission critical applications. The backend storage can be built from within the Amazon framework or using one of several other cloud providers.
At re:Invent 2013 Zadara announced a partnership with NetApp. This allows you to build a quality NetApp storage system by the hour. The solution is based on OnTap 8.2 and leverages NetApp’s existing partnership with Amazon. While more expensive per hour this does give organizations enterprise-class hardware and software for as little as $4 per hour.
Storage Swiss Take
Zadara spent an hour with us going through the various capabilities of their solution and we were impressed. A common question among more traditional data center managers is how they move to the cloud for compute and storage. Zadara is an essential building block for organizations that are looking to leverage the cloud but don’t want to radically alter their current business operations.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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