Zadara Storage and VMware Bring a Winning Storage Solution

vmware-and-zadara

Zadara Storage and VMware combined provides an unbeatable storage solution. The Zadara Storage Cloud is unique in that it’s completely flexible — available in any location, via any data type, and supporting any protocol.

Zadara Storage and VMware for Service Providers

By utilizing the VMware Certified Zadara Cloud Storage Platform in a VMware environment, our customers are able to enhance their storage by enabling clusters across multiple data centers. Starcom, as an example, uses Zadara in conjunction with VMware which enables them to offer a hybrid cloud capability. They are able to run workloads within their own data centers in a VMware environment, but also enable multi-way replication between them and customers as required. Click here to read the case study.

With the Zadara iSER option, we are seeing 33% more IOPS in our VMware environment.” -Steve Donaghue, Director of Hosting Services, Starcom

Leveraging Zadara Storage and VMware

Zadara with VMware provides advanced copy protection techniques such as instant snapshots, clones, mirroring and online volume migration. Zadara enables you to use SSD, SAS, and SATA storage technologies to suit specific Virtual Machine (VM) workloads. This, combined with flash cache, enables acceleration due to read and write caching to enhance the end-user experience. The value-add of application acceleration with replication to another Zadara VPSA or S3-compatible object storage such as Zadara ZIOS, enables rapid recovery of virtual machines (even down to a single file).  This simplifies recovery point and recovery time objectives for the business. Zadara includes enterprise storage features that enable recovery of VM’s without third-party backup and recovery tools using the RESTful Zadara API or GUI and built-in VMware tools.

For instance, using on-premise and off-premise deployments, you can replicate from Zadara Storage On-Premise to the Zadara-enabled cloud and use cloud provider migration capabilities to run workloads inside AWS/Azure. In the case of a disaster, on-premise and replication between two Zadara VPSA’s is configured. Integration with VMware SRM provides automation of the failover to the disaster recovery location through VMware capabilities. Zadara’s ability to create clones in the destination environment without the need to break the mirror enables simplified testing of disaster recovery without putting the source replication policy at risk. This simplifies Disaster Recovery Planning and enables this to be tested during normal working hours into a sandbox environment.

Another benefit of Zadara Storage and VMware is the flexibility of connectivity. Customers using both Zadara and VMware can connect their VMware Clusters over any protocol (iSCSI, FC, iSER, NFS) enabling ESXi Hypervisors and Guest Virtual Machines to make use of the enterprise storage features based upon business needs with complete customer or application isolation (if desired). This is great for service providers as it provides high performance and isolation on a per tenant basis — something that cannot be achieved on a standard dual controller storage infrastructure. The benefit of this is that it completely isolates customer end-to-end and enables the service provider to provide a consistent SLA on a per-tenant or even a per workload basis.

Service providers are using Zadara and VMware together to provide DR-as-a-Service (DRaaS), cloud scalability, replication capabilities and more. Additionally, they can leverage both organizations’ pay-per-use model. Together, VMware and Zadara provide complete resource management. Thanks to the technology of both, we are able to deliver a flexible and cost-effective software-defined data center solution.

 

Additional Resources (Customer case studies using VMware):

TU/e case study

Starcom case study

 

Co-Authored by Steve Costigan

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