Zadara rolls out on-premise pay-per-use private cloud storage

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Zadara says its new on-premise private cloud storage offering gives companies the benefits of a conventional enterprise approach but also the flexibility and scaling of a pay-as-you-go cloud service.

Describing its product as on-premise as a service, or OPaaS, the Irvine, California-based company physically delivers its Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) to enterprises, or to their colocation or service providers, which are running private clouds that include managed storage area networks and network-attached storage.

The scheme effectively enables companies to tap into storage resources that Zadara owns and manages, and pay for them according to a consumption model and without upfront capital expenditure.

"Tens of thousands of organisations have applications that need to stay on premise and behind the firewall, but so far that has meant they've been excluded from many of the benefits of software-defined storage," Zadara Storage CEO Nelson Nahum said in a statement.

He said Zadara's service is designed to save IT teams time, money and hassle and at the same time give them the elasticity and agility they need without losing the control and privacy of on-premise deployments.

Zadara's VPSA OPaaS is aimed at organisations that need upwards of 20TB of primary storage applications to multi-petabytes. There are no upfront fees, but there is a minimum commitment of six months. Companies can also form hybrid clouds by linking to Zadara Storage VPSA in public clouds, including AWS and Microsoft Azure, in sites across the world, the company said.

"Zadara OPaaS is also well suited for applications that benefit from cloud-based disaster recovery and cloud bursting, where extra cloud computing resources are applied as needed to supplement on-premise environments."

Companies are provided with access to Zadara storage via an online console through which they can increase or decrease resources. They can also opt for disk drives or SSDs.

"The entire resource [is] owned and maintained by Zadara, with included SLA, hardware replacement, remote monitoring and support," the company said.

The product also offers strong resource isolation, according to Zadara: "One workload can't impact the performance of another so you can bring in new applications without slowing down existing ones."

Ben Woo, managing director at market research firm Neuralytix, said in the Zadara statement that OPaaS is not a storage gateway, nor is it dependent on AWS, Azure or other cloud service providers.

"Instead, OPaaS represents an elastic, managed NAS and SAN with cloud capabilities built on top of it. Enterprises and service providers are looking for storage as a service that is simple and rapid to deploy, infinitely scalable, does not take up precious personnel time, and comes with a pay-per-use model," Woo said.

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