We at Zadara Storage were the first storage company to join the OpenStack community, back at the beginning of 2011. We saw the tremendous potential of what was, even back then, a great ecosystem, and sought to create the best Cloud Block Storage for OpenStack.
Our love affair with OpenStack didn’t end there. We also based our system on OpenStack Nova. Yes, we not only support Cinder as a storage device, but our product is itself an OpenStack cloud!
Today, with this OpenStack cloud, our customers can create Virtual Private Storage Arrays™ (VPSAs™), which are storage arrays similar to traditional SAN/NAS storage, but connected to the cloud servers of a given user. VPSAs are created in seconds and are completely elastic.
We are the only storage in the cloud that allows cloud users to manage their own cloud storage much like they would a SAN/NAS in their own data center. This storage offers Quality of Service by allocating dedicated resources per user, including full drives. We provide other unique capabilities too, such as volume sharing (both block and file) among multiple cloud servers.
In short, Zadara is much more than just a simple block storage system; it is a unique and compelling storage service for cloud providers to offer!
Today, we serve the enterprise customers of Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Dimension Data (previously called OpSource) by having our OpenStack cloud close to, or inside, their data centers and connected to their compute cloud.
Because of our OpenStack ties, it was natural for us to be in the first Cinder release, and to be one of the main contributors to OpenStack’s Cloud Block Storage. And, as one of the few cloud block storage options available for OpenStack cloud providers, we would like to make our solution available to a few additional cloud providers.
In addition to our integration with OpenStack Cinder, we have the great advantage of being “software only.” Cloud providers who wish to implement Zadara as their Cloud Block Storage solution can use the same type of hardware and drives they use for the rest of their cloud. We support Solid State Drives (SSDs), but not just SSD! We also support spinning drives, including high-performance SAS and high capacity SATA drives. And thanks to OpenStack, we have the impressive ability to scale to hundreds of storage nodes, as well as support billing for each user by the hour.
We are also offering a very flexible business model that allows a cloud provider to create the whole cloud block storage system without the need to pay us up front. We license our software according to the VPSAs a cloud provider sells on an affordable recurring basis.
In other words: You win, we win!
And you win big. Some of the initial cloud providers with whom we have had discussions discovered that they can create a very lucrative storage business by selling solutions based on Zadara Storage VPSA!
