Zadara™ elastic NetApp® Private Storage (NPS) for AWS
Last week’s announcement of the availability of Zadara™ elastic NetApp® Private Storage (NPS) for AWS, and our strategic relationship with NetApp, has made a lot of waves. Zadara Storage is the first data storage solution that makes available NetApp’s FAS storage arrays and Clustered Data ONTAP® operating system at AWS by the hour. Staying true to Zadara’s mission to deliver Enterprise Storage-as-a-Service and combine the best of the Cloud and IT worlds, the new elastic NPS for AWS is an instant, dynamic, AWS-attached service that uses dedicated drives, dedicated vServers and separated networking.
NetApp customers have been waiting for an elastic NetApp solution in the cloud. Here is a view into what it took to make that happen.
Under the Hood
Zadara Storage has expertise in 2 fundamental areas:
1. Enterprise Storage technology
2. Cloud technology
Our Enterprise Storage technology expertise translates to building an Enterprise-grade storage solution with reliable security and data privacy, high availability and data protection, tunable and Predictable Performance (i.e. high QoS), and a suite of data management tools – all of which we have been making (and continue to make) available in our VPSA™ Base Edition and VPSA™ Enterprise Suite solutions.
Our Cloud technology expertise is the orchestration of storage in order to make it consumable in a cloud architecture. This orchestration layer provides:
- Self-Service and Dynamic Provisioning: deploying, obtaining, configuring, changing, and tuning the storage without IT or administrator assistance, on the fly.
- Multi-Tenancy: sharing of resources across a large pool of users, while still providing the security, Predictable Performance (i.e., Quality of Service, abbreviated QoS), dedicated resources, and experience of a single-tenant environment.
- Metering and Billing: full control of and visibility into storage consumption and performance.
- Scaling: cloud-scale and hyper-scale capability and agility.
- As-a-Service: hourly metering, with no commitments.
The combination of our ability, expertise and technology in these two fields is the reason that the Zadara Storage cloud technology can make Enterprise Storage technology flexible, scalable, dynamic, and elastic, while maintaining privacy and QoS. It then stands to reason that we can also do something similar with other storage (as long as it meets certain “cloudy” criteria) and integrate our technology with existing technology to create highly compelling services.
Challenges
The main challenge our engineers had to address in enabling the Zadara™ elastic NetApp® Private Storage (NPS) for AWS was taking a traditional Enterprise Storage solution (no offense intended – this is how most storage in the world is sold and consumed) and turning it into a truly dynamic service.
On the one hand this meant integrating our eCommerce platform – which includes customer self-provisioning, metering and billing – with the NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP operating system. This means developing the orchestration to instruct the NetApp system to react appropriately (and quickly) to customers’ provisioning requests, and ensuring that the multi-tenancy comes with as much QoS as possible.
On the other hand, customers want the NetApp management interfaces, both graphical and programmatic, to which they are accustomed. This means we needed to be able to expose the NetApp GUI, APIs and CLI that enable customers to use NetApp as they do on-premise, with the same scripts, tools and commands.
The end result is a sleek, streamlined integration that provides both the dynamic provisioning on the front end, and the native NetApp interfaces on the back end. We think this is nirvana for NetApp customers who have been yearning to endow their NetApp storage with the flexibility and elasticity of AWS. And, of course, all this attaches directly and with low latency to customers’ EC2 instances at AWS.
Zadara Storage (an AWS Technology Partner) at AWS re:invent
If you’re attending AWS re:Invent (November 12-15 in Las Vegas), please come visit us at our booth or at the NetApp booth, and see a demo of our Enterprise Storage-as-a-Service SAN and NAS in the cloud solutions:
Zadara Storage at booth #711
SAN and NAS enterprise storage solutions at AWS: see how our VPSA measures up against AWS EBS, or how to deploy file (NFS and CIFS) volumes in AWS with full HA, QoS and tunable performance. Our VPSA solution offers shared volume clustering, predictable performance and full suite of data management features such as low-impact snapshots, zero-capacity clones, and asynchronous remote replication.
If you’d like to set up a private meeting with our team or management, please contact us
Zadara Storage at NetApp booth #301
Zadara Storage will be joining as a NetApp partner in the NetApp Booth #301
Booth 301 Zadara Demo Schedule
Tuesday, November 12, 5:00-7:00pm
Wednesday, November 13, 1:30-5:30pm
Thursday, November 14, 10:30am-2:30pm
Session STG401: NFS and CIFS Options for AWS
https://portal.reinvent.awsevents.com/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=1421
Friday, Nov 15, 10:15 AM – 11:15 AM – Venetian B
Craig Carl – Partner Solution Architect, Amazon Web Services
Noam Shendar – VP Business Development, Zadara Storage
Target Audience: Developer, Enterprise, Architect
In this session, learn about the use cases for Network File Systems (NFS) and Common Internet File Systems (CIFS), and when NFS and CIFS are appropriate on AWS. We cover the use cases for ephemeral, Amazon EBS, Amazon EBS P-IOPS, and Amazon S3 as the persistent stores for NFS and CIFS shares. We share AWS CloudFormation templates that build multiple solutions—a single instance with Amazon EBS, clustered instances with Amazon EBS, and Gluster cluster—as well as introduce AWS partner solutions.
