Freedom! (from “Ooops!”)

Like many marketing organizations, Zadara marketing decided to do a promotion with a “Freedom” theme this week. I have to admit that my first reaction was to the effect of, “Oh. How… original.” But, perhaps in a moment of weakness induced by anticipation of fireworks and barbecue, I reconsidered. I mean,  it seems to work for everything from automobiles to bedroom furniture, so who am I to judge?

Most people will agree that freedom is good. But what is it? Freedom from tyranny? Yeah, sure. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” Not terribly original, but hard to argue with. But what about something really important?

What about freedom from “Ooops?”

When you’re responsible for enterprise storage, “Ooops!” is one of the worst feelings in the world. Storage professionals harbor as many distinct (and strong) opinions as anyone, and I’ve known any number of storage teams that were plenty happy to argue, loudly, about almost anything (don’t give me that look – you know I’m right). But get them on the subject of “Ooops!”, and the smiles disappear, the eyes head for the floor, and the room goes quiet. Because we all know what it feels like. Something went pear-shaped. And it’s our fault.

What went wrong? Could be almost anything. Almost any surprise in enterprise storage is likely to be bad, and there are simply too many scenarios to comprehensively list. Working from recent analyst publications, the leading candidates are:

  • We’re running out of capacity and budget because capacity growth requirements are accelerating, and this has blown our planning out of the water 
  • We’re okay on overall capacity, but we are consuming the wrong kind of capacity on the wrong applications
  • We need more storage (see the first point) and it’s expensive, plus our CapEx budget is done
  • Users are complaining about performance, possibly because their data was put on the wrong storage type because we’re running out of capacity (oh, look, “synergy”!)
  • We bought all-flash last year, but new performance requirements really want NVMe.\
  • Our legacy storage doesn’t really fit cloud architectures (particularly hybrid and multi-cloud)

So, how do we declare independence from “Ooops?

(Mozart would be better, but most people won’t get why)

One thing we could do is to always be right. Now that would really save a lot of work, not to mention sleep. Just have all of our requirement estimates (guesses) turn out to be correct.

Unfortunately, relying on personal perfection is not, for most of us, a useful strategy. 

If personal perfection is out, what’s “Plan B?”

How about making someone else responsible? Like, maybe, the most experienced company in enterprise Storage-as-a-service?

Let’s go back through our sample “Ooops!” cases and see what happens when you get your enterprise storage from Zadara:

Out of capacity:
Tell us you want more. It gets added non-disruptively and shows up on your next monthly bill (you can also tell us that you want less).

Wrong kind of capacity:
Tell us what you want and where. Not only are we happy to supply it, our outstanding devops team will happily work with you to get it just the way you want it. At no extra fee (you may want to read that last bit again).

Expensive/CapEx:
Zadara helps you break free from the effort and complexity of CapEx acquisition cycles. But where you really save money is in not having to over-buy capacity; just order capacity when you need it (Zadara customers frequently run 90% – 95% storage utilization rates)

Performance:
With Zadara, you can align performance to business-driven requirements. Need all-flash? Great, use that. Need all hard disk? Fine, use that. Need a mix of flash and hard disk? Sure. Need to move between media types? We have you covered. Again, all part of the service.

Need tech refresh:
This is a HUGE point. I have
another blog post that compares upgrading Zadara storage, but the short version is, “Just ask for it.” Really. Any time after new hardware options are released, you can just ask to get upgraded. At no additional charge.

So, no reason to hold off until a new technology is released. Get the storage you need now and request a no-charge upgrade when the new options become available. Maybe I should have called this “Freedom from buyer’s remorse.”

Cloud storage:
That’s how Zadara does what it does. Zadara storage was architected from the ground up to deliver the control of enterprise storage with the agility of the cloud(s!) Want on-premises enterprise storage to support traditional IT? Check. Private cloud? Check. Hybrid cloud? Check. Multi-cloud? Check.

Let’s face it, it’s easy to make claims that (sort of) sound like these; seems like everyone is doing it. But, uniquely, this is what Zadara was built to do. It’s all we do. And we’ve been doing it for over eight years.

So, if you really want to be free from “Ooops!”, ping us and let’s talk about what keeps you up at night. And how you can put that load right on Zadara.

Zadara Team

Zadara Team

Since 2011, Zadara’s Edge Cloud Platform (ZCP) simplifies operational complexity through automated, end-to-end provisioning of compute, storage and network resources.

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