Five years ago, we started Zadara Storage with the idea that storage should be enabled by software rather than hardware. We saw the challenges IT managers were experiencing with traditional storage – it was rigid, it was costly, it was delivered in a way that made organizations slow to react and locked organizations into expensive, inflexible proprietary solutions.
We believed there was a better way to do storage. An agile, flexible and dynamic service, where customers gained freedom but didn’t have to compromise on performance, features, security and other capabilities that they’re used to. We had a vision of storage that was always aligned with customers and their ever-changing needs.
The changes we were envisioning for storage were part of an overall trend and a craving for new architectures, flexibility and efficiency. Over the last five years we’ve seen the storage industry undergo more changes than it has in several decades. Hyperscale architectures, disaggregation and hyperconvergence, software-defined infrastructures, flash technology and cloud computing are the new cornerstones of storage.
Imagine that just five years ago, we had to first explain why the cloud mattered before we could explain why the industry was broken. We had to explain that storage could be approached from a new perspective, and to inspire people to think differently in a world that had until then only offered rigid hardware and CapEx-based storage from a few dominant providers.
We’ve grown together with the cloud. Initially, the cloud’s shortfalls enabled us to show how cloud architectures could be better leveraged. We showed how with Zadara Storage, enterprises could deploy existing applications in the cloud and achieve high, consistent performance and uncompromised security easily and seamlessly. As the cloud has grown to become the defacto deployment architecture, it has helped organizations see the benefits of OpEx and as-a-Service offerings. It was our customers who inspired our On Premise as a Service (OPaaS) offering, as they wanted to see those benefits of agility, flexibility and management within their own data center walls.
Five years ago, we knew monolithic storage was outdated and we had no doubt that the world of storage was changing from the ground up. But even we couldn’t predict how fast. To see EMC’s recent acquisition and NetApp’s struggling business model, it is clear that the storage world is in turmoil and it will never again be the same. The world is changing and the future is all about flexible, elastic storage that supports your business. We’re very excited to be at the forefront of these changes and to provide organizations with solutions that are always aligned with their needs.
