Prepping for the upcoming AWS Summit in San Francisco, we thought it would be a great opportunity to highlight some of the storage features you probably didn’t even know existed at AWS!
One of the greatest things about AWS is the rich, bountiful ecosystem of services (including our own Virtual Private Storage Arrays). Solutions such as our own enable customers to do so much more in AWS. For our customers this means, for example, the ability to migrate existing applications to the cloud (many had thought this was impossible), or support an easier and more effective disaster recovery strategy.
- 1-minute RPO – replicate across the globe
- NetApp on an hourly basis – with no commitment
- Native NFS and CIFS – supporting 100TB+ volumes
- QoS Predictable Performance
- Pick your choice of hardware
1. Sleep better at night with 1-minute RPO: replicate across Availability Zones, Global Regions (and even to another provider!)
The most effective methods for protecting data are to create redundant copies using periodic differential backups and continuous replication. And to achieve true disaster recovery, one should replicate over a large distance to ensure data retention even in case of natural disasters or other localized downtime.
Customers using our Virtual Private Storage Array SAN and NAS as a service at AWS can perform asynchronous remote replication to any of our global locations, including AWS US West, US East, Europe and Asia Pacific (Japan). With VPSA’s advanced data management features, customers can achieve a one-minute RPO with unlimited, low-impact snapshots and ensure protection for the most stringent demands. Replication is bi-directional replication so you can link, break and re-merge volumes as necessary.
No matter where you are in the world, you’re a reasonable replication distance from a Zadara data center – so that at the push of a button you can automatically replicate to many other places on the planet.
2. NetApp FAS storage array hardware by the hour. No kidding!
We teamed up with NetApp to allow IT managers the ability to deploy workloads using AWS resources on NetApp storage – by the hour. Zadara now delivers NetApp Private Storage (NPS) for AWS as a service, with no upfront purchases or commitments. The Zadara elastic NetApp® Private Storage (eNPS) for AWS is the first data storage solution that makes available NetApp’s FAS storage array hardware at AWS using dedicated drives, vServers and separated networking – and delivered instantly as a dynamic, elastic cloud based service. Whether for replication or test/development – you can deploy a NetApp FAS, scale it up or down, and shut it down – all billed on an hourly basis.
3. Get native NAS (NFS and CIFS) – make your volumes BIG and SHARE them to multiple instances!
One of the main challenges for many of our customers as they look to move to the cloud is the lack of NFS and CIFS support. For complicated file trees and large files the lack of NAS support and the limited block volume size of only 1TB creates a big headache for storage managers.
Our VPSA technology looks, performs and behaves like an Enterprise NAS appliance—with an NFS / CIFS server, dual HA controllers, dedicated high performance drives and Enterprise class NAS features— including clustering and sharing capabilities for large volumes. See how one customer scaled from 100 volumes to just 1, using Zadara at AWS – and just how simple storage management can be for enterprise applications.
4. Get real QoS and Predictable Performance!
‘Noisy neighbors’ still provides for some of the cloud’s biggest challenges as users experience performance degradation due to shared resources. Until Zadara came along, this affected vital applications, challenged SLAs, and kept the cloud from delivering on the mission critical needs of the enterprise. No longer. Our VPSA patent-pending architecture ensures isolated, dedicated resources for each user. You can tune your IO and throughput performance up and down according to your needs and budget, with consistent Quality of Service for your Amazon compute instances.
5. Choose your hardware – you can even take it home!
We’ve often referred to public cloud storage as a ‘blob’ (check out our animated video about cloud block storage) as customers generally receive generic storage with very little control over the hardware, resources or even location of their data. For enterprises to truly take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity, agility and enticing cost benefits, they not only need robust storage, that’s consistent, reliable and feature-rich, they also need to have granular control of their storage.
With Zadara’s service at AWS, you can build your Virtual Private Storage Array with your choice of dedicated resources – choose your drive type – SAS, SATA or SSD – drive capacity, and drivespeed, as well as your ‘engine’ (a virtual controller with dedicated memory and processing power), at any chosen Zadara service location. Your hardware is dedicated to you and will not be shared with any other users. Your data will remain on your dedicated hardware as long as you use it, meaning that in extreme circumstances you could even buy your physical drives from us and physically remove them to ensure no data traces are left in the cloud.
We’ll also be demoing the Zadara elastic NetApp® Private Storage for AWS in the NetApp booth.
