The True “Cost” of Enterprise Storage – A Different Approach

The Cost of Enterprise Storage

In the first part of this blog I reviewed some of the new operational challenges that have to be undertaken to ensure that storage runs smoothly, and their ensuing costs.

In this blog, I’ll be looking at how Zadara Storage have taken a different approach to both cloud and on-premises storage with the VPSA (Virtual Private Storage Array).

This new storage model includes:

Pricing

Both solutions use a “pay per usage” model where charges are based on an hourly consumption figure for capacity. Customers pay for what they consume, not what they have to forward plan for. Additionally, Zadara proactively reduces their pricing from time to time when they can take advantage industry price reductions. And it is important to note that these price reductions are not just for new customers, but are applied to existing customers. Therefore, you are able to immediately take advantage of market decreases, rather than waiting for your next hardware refresh.

Flexibility

Customers can easily scale their storage capacity on demand. There’s no longer a need to plan well ahead and over-purchase capacity when disks can be added to a VPSA in a matter of hours. It is important to note that capacity (and performance) is elastic in both directions. In other words, you can add (or decrease) capacity and performance, as needed, any time you want.

Agility

The “V” in VPSA means virtual – no physical array to manage. The effort of maintaining the VPSA becomes the responsibility of Zadara, removing a significant amount of operational overhead. Zadara also maintains responsibility for upgrading to new technology, removing the need for continual “fork-lift upgrades”. The VPSA design means it’s possible to create multiple VPSAs for different lines of business, providing physical disk and logical application isolation that reduces the performance and change management overhead.

Of course Zadara’s solution comes with all the standard features expected of enterprise storage solutions, including thin provisioning, data protection (snapshots, clones, replication, online volume migration), encryption and simple management/monitoring. This means there’s no sacrifice in functionality in order to reduce operational costs.

TCO calculation

More details on the Zadara service offerings, including use case discussions with customers and benefits can be found in a recent Evaluator Group report that touches on the operational aspects of implementing shared storage including outline TCO calculations – which you can download here.

Further details on the VPSA solution and how it transforms enterprise storage cost can be found on the Zadara website.

 

Share This Post

More To Explore