Rackspace recently announced CBS, their new cloud block storage offering.
This product is similar to Amazon’s EBS, and allows the allocation of external block storage to cloud servers.
In addition to CBS, there is another storage option for Rackspace customers who require high performance and advanced storage capabilities for their cloud servers: Zadara Storage.
This article compares these two storage alternatives for users of Rackspace Cloud.
In general, CBS is cheaper than Zadara. However, there are some unique features of Zadara Storage that make it an appealing alternative for some use cases.
This article is intended to be a guideline for determining in which use cases Zadara Storage should be employed.
Features of Zadara not present in CBS
- Assign full drives to a particular user; avoid the “noisy neighbor”
- User can create volumes larger than 1TB
- Zadara works with new OpenStack as well as with legacy cloud servers
- User can choose to mount volumes as block devices (iSCSI) or file systems (NFS)
- Share a single volume between multiple Cloud Servers machines
- Utilize clustering software in Cloud Servers (MS SQL cluster, Linux HA, etc.)
- Encrypt data with the user controlling the password for the keys
- Create different RAID types based on the customer’s application
- High Availability: Zadara has dual controller configuration, no single point of failure
Use cases for Zadara Storage
The following use cases, not currently covered by CBS, are supported by Zadara Storage:
- when more than a 1TB volume is needed.
- when a high availability scheme (e.g., clustering) is needed, requiring access to a single volume from multiple Cloud Servers.
- when NAS as a service is needed for sharing data between multiple Cloud Servers.
- when security measures are required to encrypt the data and/or have dedicated drives.
- when the amount of data used is multiple TBs and it makes more sense to have your own drives and full control of your storage environment.
- when the user needs protection against CBS failures (replicating between CBS and Zadara).
- when the user wants the same capabilities on different cloud providers, like AWS, Rackspace and OpSource.
In summary, many customers choose Zadara Storage when they want to run a database (like PostgreSQL or MySQL) on reliable storage in the cloud.
Zadara Storage fills the gap between CBS volumes and a dedicated environment on the managed hosting side of Rackspace. Zadara has the flexibility and economics of the cloud with the dedicated resources and control of the hosting environment.
Zadara VPSA can be provisioned from the Rackspace marketplace using this link:
https://cloudtools.rackspace.
