Industry Brief Zadara Storage Summit 2015010
Industry Brief Zadara Storage Summit 2015 This year’s Zadara Storage Summit in Las Vegas was highlighted by presentations from Amazon AWS, who is partnering with Zadara around the world, and case studies from five Zadara Storage customers. Base Media Cloud, Burwood Group, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Orixcom and Telecity Group come from distinctly different industries, but all of them managed a recent enterprise storage refresh which ended in deploying storage-as-a-service. The following are my five takeaways from the customer presentations.
#1 Business is driving IT for breakthroughs in efficiency and cost The IT department at Cal Poly University was under such severe budget constraints that capital expenses were on-hold, and new equipment was being leased only when operating expenses were freed by retiring old equipment with expensive service contracts. As the need for computing and storage capacity at Cal Poly continues to grow, the administration and IT department opened the door to IaaS technologies promising breakthroughs in efficiency and cost. The result is Cal Poly’s 7-year old, monolithic, single-tenant storage infrastructure has been transformed into an elastic, multi-tenant environment which grows and shrinks exactly to the specification of each IT customer at the university.
#2 Enterprise storage vendors are stuck on selling and leasing Most of the customers said they considered EMC and NetApp for their next generation storage. However, they also said none of the traditional enterprise storage vendors were able to provide apples-to-apples quotes for storage-as-aservice. Fortunately for Zadara, despite all the cloud-washing of their marketing materials, traditional storage vendors are stuck on selling or leasing premiumpriced, brand-name hardware and software licenses.
#3 OPaaS lets IT eat their cake No one wants to give-up their primary storage and ship their business data off to the cloud. But almost everyone likes the idea of paying for compute power and storage capacity in the same way you pay your phone, water, electric and gas utility bills. Storage deployed as on-premise-as-a-service means that IT can have their cake and eat it too. Business data stays on-site, and you pay only for what you use.
Zadara Storage Summit Industry Brief, July 2015, v2
#4 OPaaS makes AWS better What I heard from Zadara customers is they don’t mind using public cloud compute power to run their applications, but in some cases they prefer to keep their data storage on-site. Enterprise Storage-as-a-Service offerings, which are integrated with AWS public cloud compute services, make AWS better by allowing IT organizations to choose thirdparty storage services which meet a specific requirement such as on-premise Storage-as-a-Service.
#5 Zadara is leading the migration to a software-defined storage architecture The enterprise is at the beginning of a 10-year migration from hardware defined storage, to software defined storage. Software defined storage architectures already power hyperscale cloud service providers such as Facebook and AWS. Building on the same architecture, SDS pioneers like Zadara are cost reducing enterprise storage hardware by using white box servers and networks. Zadara is also incredibly agile. The company is releasing software enhancements at a dizzying monthly pace compared to the years required for major releases from traditional enterprise storage vendors.
The Future of Enterprise Storage is Software Defined
Commercial versions of Enterprise Software Defined Storage
Software Defined Storage Storage-as-a-Service White Box Servers Public Cloud
On or off–premise
Hyperscale SDS
Enterprise SDS
On-Premise
Traditional HW Defined Enterprise Storage
Summary Enterprise storage is trending towards a new class of storage which is: 1) software defined, 2) delivered as a service, and located in the cloud and on-premise. Zadara Storage embodies all three of these capabilities, and is establishing early incumbency as a leader in enterprise storage of the future. Customers whole heartily substantiated this claim during the Zadara Storage Summit 2015.
Zadara Storage Summit Industry Brief, July 2015, v2
#1 Business is driving IT for breakthroughs in efficiency and cost The IT department at Cal Poly University was under such severe budget constraints that capital expenses were on-hold, and new equipment was being leased only when operating expenses were freed by retiring old equipment with expensive service contracts. As the need for computing and storage capacity at Cal Poly continues to grow, the administration and IT department opened the door to IaaS technologies promising breakthroughs in efficiency and cost. The result is Cal Poly’s 7-year old, monolithic, single-tenant storage infrastructure has been transformed into an elastic, multi-tenant environment which grows and shrinks exactly to the specification of each IT customer at the university.
#2 Enterprise storage vendors are stuck on selling and leasing Most of the customers said they considered EMC and NetApp for their next generation storage. However, they also said none of the traditional enterprise storage vendors were able to provide apples-to-apples quotes for storage-as-aservice. Fortunately for Zadara, despite all the cloud-washing of their marketing materials, traditional storage vendors are stuck on selling or leasing premiumpriced, brand-name hardware and software licenses.
#3 OPaaS lets IT eat their cake No one wants to give-up their primary storage and ship their business data off to the cloud. But almost everyone likes the idea of paying for compute power and storage capacity in the same way you pay your phone, water, electric and gas utility bills. Storage deployed as on-premise-as-a-service means that IT can have their cake and eat it too. Business data stays on-site, and you pay only for what you use.
Zadara Storage Summit Industry Brief, July 2015, v2
#4 OPaaS makes AWS better What I heard from Zadara customers is they don’t mind using public cloud compute power to run their applications, but in some cases they prefer to keep their data storage on-site. Enterprise Storage-as-a-Service offerings, which are integrated with AWS public cloud compute services, make AWS better by allowing IT organizations to choose thirdparty storage services which meet a specific requirement such as on-premise Storage-as-a-Service.
#5 Zadara is leading the migration to a software-defined storage architecture The enterprise is at the beginning of a 10-year migration from hardware defined storage, to software defined storage. Software defined storage architectures already power hyperscale cloud service providers such as Facebook and AWS. Building on the same architecture, SDS pioneers like Zadara are cost reducing enterprise storage hardware by using white box servers and networks. Zadara is also incredibly agile. The company is releasing software enhancements at a dizzying monthly pace compared to the years required for major releases from traditional enterprise storage vendors.
The Future of Enterprise Storage is Software Defined
Commercial versions of Enterprise Software Defined Storage
Software Defined Storage Storage-as-a-Service White Box Servers Public Cloud
On or off–premise
Hyperscale SDS
Enterprise SDS
On-Premise
Traditional HW Defined Enterprise Storage
Summary Enterprise storage is trending towards a new class of storage which is: 1) software defined, 2) delivered as a service, and located in the cloud and on-premise. Zadara Storage embodies all three of these capabilities, and is establishing early incumbency as a leader in enterprise storage of the future. Customers whole heartily substantiated this claim during the Zadara Storage Summit 2015.
Zadara Storage Summit Industry Brief, July 2015, v2
