Noam Shendar | AWS Summit 2015
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 09/04/2015

How Zadara Storage provides dedicated storage services on demand | #AWSSummit
by Rachel Schramm | Apr 9, 2015 

Zadara Storage provides storage cloud services around the world by delivering enterprise hardware at consumer-level prices. Their mission, said Noam Shendar, COO at Zadara Storage, is to give customers the flexibility to pay only for the storage they use — and to increase or decrease their amount of storage at will.

How Zadara Works
 
Zadara currently supports both public and private storage clouds both within the United States and abroad and mandates those clouds from just a few locations. Their product, said Shendar is “designed to be very cost effective.” Because Zadara clouds run on commodity hardware, there’s very little upfront cost to the customer. “You get storage On-Premise,” Shendar explained, “and we charge you for usage.” There is, he mentioned, a six-month commitment that Zadara requires to keep their logistics under control.

In order to achieve a centralized management, Zadara shares management with its customers. Zadara takes care of all the “low-value marginalia,” Shendar noted, like software upgrades and hardware replacement, while clients take care of high-level management tasks.

Another key point about Zadara, Shendar called out, is it’s dual-control, per-array, self-healing architecture. Customers have ability to “spawn as many virtual arrays as you need.” The arrays are “self-healing,” Shendar explained, “because they’re virtual.” Should one array fail, Zadara will spawn another.
 
Why Zadara is winning

 “At AWS, [Zadara is] winning because we’re proving storage that solves the problems of the most demanding customers,” Shendar stated. There’s a whole segment of clients that AWS can’t help properly, he explained. They’re clients with “very specific problems,” who “don’t like to read the manual,” according to Shendar. Zadara can service these customers with a range of features and 24/7 support.

How Zadara combats over provisioning
 
One of the central problems with storage, Shendar acknowledged, is over-provisioning: when clients pay for an excess of storage capacity that they don’t use. Zadara eliminates that obstacle by offering consumption pricing. Their clients pay by the hour and “never pay for what [they] don’t use,” said Shendar. Furthermore, he stressed, should a drive fail, getting a new one up and running is just a few clicks away. Therefore “there’s never a reason to over provision, because there’s always more at your fingertips,” Shendar explained.

And if clients need to lower the amount they spend on IT, it’s also easy. All a client would need to do is delete somethings, consolidate and then give Zadara back the capacity they’re not using. In fact, Shendar stated that Zadara can “recycle at the node level.” Because they “own the node,” said Shendar, it’s a simple matter of selling that capacity to another customer. And their pricing on AWS and on premises is exactly the same.
 
Storage companies need to change

 Shendar believes there are three central ways that storage companies need to change:
1. Provide consumption pricing: The traditional business model of cloud storage delivery “is wrong,” said Shendar. “The capX model is wrong,” he added and continued stating that “flex leases with a big base capacity is wrong.” Generally, he remarked, anyone who says they’re providing cloud pricing but not offering hourly rates, is wrong. What’s right, he said, is consumption pricing that allows customers to grow and shrink as they see fit.
2. Provide something better than warranty: Zadara provides a SAL [service-level agreement], which Shendar says, is “better than warranty.” Essentially, he says, SAL means that “the thing will keep running, or [customers] don’t pay us.” It’s ideal for customers who need a lot of storage, but don’t want to deal with it.
3. Keep up with the times: As new technologies make life easier for customers on the cloud, other customers notice and demand the same types of features. For example, Zadara is able to swap customer’s underlying architecture in a way that is non-disruptive to the customer. Likewise, Amazon doesn’t go down when they change the hardware.

Customers are beginning to take notice of these benefits are are demanding them on-premises from their traditional providers — or leaving them for greener pastures.

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