Zadara sees strong momentum for enterprise storage as a service

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1 Zadara sees strong momentum for enterprise storage as a service Analyst: Simon Robinson 1 May, 2015 Zadara Storage positions itself as offering enterprise-grade storage in a pure 'as a service' model, and says it has garnered strong momentum over the last year as more IT organizations look to leverage the convenience, agility and potential cost savings of cloud-style IT models. Although the majority of the company's customers are still driven via the Amazon Web Services cloud, Zadara says the initial uptake of its on-premises-as-a-service (OPaaS) offering, launched last August, has been strong. Moreover, the company says recent moves from other major cloud and storage players including AWS and NetApp are validating the market, and creating further business opportunities through greater awareness. The 451 Take The industry appears to be approaching a tipping point in terms of how it collectively thinks about cloud storage so far, it has mostly been viewed either as a 'cheap and deep' option for backups and DR copies, or a platform for modern apps designed to run on the cloud. Zadara was, until recently, mostly a lone voice (outside of the public cloud providers) for running enterprise-grade storage services in the cloud. But the emergence of alternatives from NetApp, Amazon and others has validated that many IT organizations are contemplating other models to run their enterprise storage on. That, of course, also brings more competition for Zadara; but in our view, the company remains an intriguing prospect for more forward-looking IT departments. Strategy Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 We last covered Zadara a year ago, as the company was preparing to launch its OPaaS capability. This service, which involves installing its core Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) capability directly into the datacenter of an IT organization or service provider, launched last August. Zadara describes OPaaS as offering enterprise-grade SAN and NAS capabilities, with the big difference being that it is delivered entirely as a fully managed private cloud service. In other words, it is the same product it offers in the cloud, but it physically lives in the customer's datacenter. Customers are required to make a six-month commitment, but only pay for capacity when it is consumed (Zadara overprovisions storage to allow for growth). Besides the pay-as-you-grow opex model, customers don't have to worry about managing storage themselves, or planning for storage migrations and refreshes this is all done by Zadara as part of the service. Zadara's OPaaS offers the same range of features as the cloud-based VPSA, including unified SAN (iscsi) and NAS (NFS and SMB), flash caching, remote mirroring, asynchronous replication, snapshots, clones, thin provisioning, QoS and data encryption. OPaaS is available in five configurations baby, basic, boost, blast and blazing (with more to come soon) offering varying levels of performance and capacity. Zadara does not disclose pricing since this changes frequently, based on the falling cost of COTS hardware. It does not charge by the GB/mo instead it is priced based on the configuration but the company says its pricing is highly competitive with cloud storage such as AWS. Users can build their VPSA online using the simple configuration tool (e.g., engines/controllers, drive types, number of drives, memory, etc.) and view their pricing as they build out their virtual array. Since launch, Zadara says, it has garnered solid initial momentum for OPaaS, including a mix of enterprises, cloud service providers and colo players, which the company says demonstrates the broad appeal of its offering. It has been encouraged by sales cycles that are much shorter than those of traditional enterprise storage many customers have made repeat purchases following the initial order. It says service providers in particular have warmed to the concept, because they can build out a cloud storage infrastructure, but only pay for it when they have revenue-generating customers consuming it. Commercial progress Meanwhile, Zadara continues to push ahead with selling VPSA services into a variety of cloud-service provider environments. So far, VPSA is supporting clouds from more than 10 cloud service providers in dozens of locations worldwide: Amazon Web Services (six regions), Microsoft Azure (three regions), Dimension Data (three regions), CloudSigma, Equinix, FlexiScale, Eircom, DR Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 Fortress, Object Ventures, SerenITaaS and Cloudreach. One of the company's latest wins is TeleCity Group. The provider is offering storage-as-a-service based on VPSA as part of its Cloud-IX service (which TeleCity acquired recently as part of Interxion). It's initially up and running in TeleCity's London and Amsterdam hubs, but will potentially be rolled out to additional locations throughout Europe. Earlier this year, Zadara entered the Chinese market via a partnership with IT provider Futong. While Zadara says it is experiencing strong growth across multiple partners and regions, the majority of its customers today somewhere between 50 and 100 are running on AWS. Zadara says key use cases in the Amazon cloud are around storing geospatial data, the education market and audio/video streaming. VPSA data on the Amazon cloud is split roughly between block and file data, although about 40% of revenue comes from block storage services. Zadara notes that in many cases, it has been instrumental in helping Amazon win or retain business; for example, it was able to offer one of its university clients a more tailored experience that allowed it to 'hibernate' storage services outside of tuition times (such as weekends), thereby saving money. In other scenarios, it was able to add differentiated services, such as consistent high performance for video streaming, over and above Amazon's core services. Zadara says its ability to offer stronger data governance controls such as guaranteed data deletion also helps those customers that want the convenience of the cloud, without compromising their ability to control their own data. Zadara established a presence in the newest AWS region Frankfurt, Germany earlier this year, with partner Equinix. Besides supporting customers in central Europe as part of this arrangement, it is now able to automatically replicate data between Frankfurt and the AWS colocated facility in Dublin. Capabilities On the capability front, Zadara has been busy adding new features and functions to its core VPSA platform. Late last year, it added a multi-zone HA capability, providing against facility-level failure and less catastrophic issues across metropolitan locations. The service synchronously replicates SAN and NAS data across a metropolitan-area network, providing what Zadara claims is automatic and transparent failure in the event of a facility failure, with zero RTO and RPO. While this obviously only works synchronously with MAN-connected datacenters (Zadara currently supports this feature on AWS, though others will be added over time), the company says it can also Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 now replicate asynchronously to any of Zadara's 40-odd public storage clouds worldwide, including between service providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure. As part of this release, Zadara also added support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). Another noteworthy announcement from Zadara has been its support last year for the emerging iser (iscsi Extensions for RDMA) Ethernet transport mechanism, which it says drastically cuts latency to boost block application performance when used with 40Gb Ethernet. Zadara is offering iser NICs from Mellanox with VPSA for OPaaS customers. Meanwhile, the company recently added a number of usability features aimed specifically at service providers, including improved billing, and expanded language and currency support, as well as custom branding support. Looking forward, Zadara says it has a full development pipeline; we'd note that although it offers file and block storage services, it has yet to offer an object storage capability. We wouldn't be surprised to see something along these lines in the future. Competition Although cloud storage-as-a-service has been available since Amazon first unveiled S3 in 2006, the market appears to be entering a new phase of competition as offerings mature and more players enter the game. It's becoming increasingly evident that the migration of many applications to cloud-based models is being held back in part by the lack of 'enterprise grade' cloud-based storage capabilities. In this context, 'enterprise grade' refers to storage features such as high availability, snapshots and replication, and data management and security aspects such as encryption and the ability to control exactly where data physically resides and how it is deleted. With such barriers removed (as with the Zadara VPSA offering), many believe that more data and applications will flow to the cloud. From a market landscape perspective, it's notable that different storage vendors view public clouds such as AWS very differently. Storage giant EMC was initially quite hostile, and though this has softened to some extent it supports S3 as a tier in some of its products it still views AWS as a rival, and is instead trying to 'arm' other service providers to become more capable rivals. NetApp, but contrast, has a very different view it has designed specific offerings for such platforms, such as its Cloud OnTap software and its NetApp Private Cloud Storage for AWS. Indeed, the development of Cloud OnTap effectively ended the fledgling partnership that Zadara had developed with NetApp. Meanwhile, IBM is mostly concentrated on directing storage traffic to its SoftLayer cloud; its new Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 Spectrum Storage strategy aims to make all of its storage products available as a cloud-like service. Zadara argues that while major storage OEMs may be superficially getting in on the storage-as-a-service act, the realities of transitioning to a pure as-a-service financial model remain a huge problem. As a startup, Zadara has no such constraints. Elsewhere, there's competition directly and indirectly from a large pack of storage players emphasizing a range of cloud-based and software defined approaches. This includes the likes of Red Hat (Ceph and Gluster), SoftNAS (which offers NAS services on AWS), Nexenta, and even emerging products from major players, such as EMC's ScaleIO. Finally, there's the issue of whether Amazon which we now know is the $6bn gorilla of the cloud market is a rival to players such as Zadara, or a partner. Although Zadara stresses that it views AWS as 'not 1% competitive' with what it does, there is inevitably some degree of competition as it continues to expand its services, the latest of which will be a move into NAS-as-a-service, with EFS. However, for the time being, the 'partner/competitor' nature seems to be working Zadara says that as far as driving business for itself, VPSA has been instrumental in winning or retaining business for Amazon. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Zadara's pure enterprise storage 'as a service' model is distinctive and unusual, and so far, has generated solid momentum on Amazon and other cloud platforms. The company is still relatively unknown and has a limited amount of traction directly among enterprises. Opportunities Threats IT organizations are becoming more comfortable with the cloud model, and providers such as Zadara offer a good blend of convenience and control. The competitive landscape is becoming increasingly noisy as a range of players develop cloud- and software-defined approaches. Meanwhile, Zadara partners such as AWS continue to expand their own storage services. Copyright The 451 Group 5

6 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 6