It’s exciting times here at Zadara Storage – we recently announced our support for Microsoft Azure, and with it the availability of the first truly multi-cloud storage solution, our customer base is rapidly expanding. We’ve even been crowned ‘cool vendor’ by Gartner’s prestigious listing.
With the rapid growth of our ecosystem, we are also continuously expanding our team. Yesterday, we announced two major hires joining our management team: Craig Carl, who is our new vice president of products, and Dani Naor, vice president of international sales.
These two distinguished storage industry veterans hail from some of the biggest forces shaping storage today: Craig from AWS, and Dani from EMC’s XtremIO group. They both had hands-on experience working with customers to help solve their biggest storage challenges, and bring tremendous knowledge, experience, and expertise.
I wanted to take this opportunity to sit down with them and talk about why they joined the Zadara team, hear their perspective on where the industry heading and what the biggest challenges ahead are for cloud and storage. Most importantly, I want to show off the caliber of our newest team members to our customers and partners. Welcome aboard!
Let’s start with what people are most curious to hear: you both held leadership positions in market-dominant companies – what made you join Zadara?
Dani Naor: I actually know part of the team from back in the StoreAge days. It’s truly an outstanding team from a technical knowhow perspective, business understanding and vision. In addition to that, Zadara unique technological solution introduces cloud storage with advanced features that enable hosting companies, enterprise customers and service providers enormously improve their data center while lowering costs substantially. It’s a win-win situation for the customer, and that’s a value proposition I look forward to drive.
Craig Carl: At AWS customers routinely reached the limits of the storage services; EBS volume size and performance, non-sharable volumes, the absence of a file services product. AWS solution architects routinely brought Zadara in to solve these problems for our customers because we knew Zadara shared the same customer focus as Amazon and that our customers could trust the Zadara solution. During my work with Zadara at AWS, I got to see the opportunities, technology and value that Zadara brings to customers, and this made me excited. My new position is a great opportunity to be part of a dynamic start up. I love talking to customers – it’s my favorite thing in the world – and this is a great opportunity to work with them and deliver solutions that truly address their storage pain points.
What are the biggest challenges you see enterprise customers facing today when it comes to storage?
Craig Carl: I think enterprise storage customers have been underserved by their vendors for the last several decades. True, storage has gotten faster and less expensive per TB but these evolutionary changes have primarily been driven by component manufacturers and have not been surfaced to customers as quickly as they could have been.
Despite a decade of marketing messages to the contrary, enterprise storage customers still have no effective capacity on demand storage acquisition options, are still paying a premium for massively undersubscribed arrays and then “growing into” them over several years.
There is no doubt that storage customers of every size and across every vertical are looking at the incredible power that the public cloud can offer them; it’s also true that their current storage vendor isn’t helping them move and manage workloads in the cloud. This monolithic, on-premise only approach does customers a disservice.
Multi-tenancy, workload isolation and bill-back options in enterprise SAN solutions are still weak, these are all basic requirements of on-premise, multi-tenant IT solutions (private clouds).
Dani Naor: In my view, the biggest challenges for customers these days revolve around how to manage efficiently the huge data growth requirements while ensuring data is secured, backed up, and protected against any type of failure and disaster while keeping costs as low as possible. These are huge challenges as data sets are growing at an exponential pace, and companies need to do more with this data (not just archive, but also analyze) – data has become the most critical asset, and it needs to be both managed and secured.
If I look at the market outside the USA, customers are reluctant these days to connect to a public cloud due to the fear of data security. This is something Zadara can really change in the market. Our security, privacy and dedicated resource features make the public cloud much more similar to a private cloud, with full control of where a customer’s data resides and who can access it. We can also help them build a private solution now, and thanks to our footprint and replication, very easily go to the cloud later if they are ready.
Where does Zadara Storage fit within this storage and cloud universe and what do you envision and are excited about for your upcoming?
Dani Naor: Zadara Storage enables customers to use internal (on-premise), external, or mixed hybrid cloud NAS and SAN storage solutions with a full range of advanced features and on demand regardless of location. This unmatched flexibility enables the customer to use their storage in an optimized and efficient way lowing costs, while enabling full control, security and disaster recovery.
I am excited to be part of a startup team that is offering a unique and advanced cloud storage solution that is focused bringing huge benefits to hosting companies, cloud companies, enterprise customers and service providers around the globe. I’ve worked with enterprises, and hosting companies around the globe for many years, and this is a solution that really gets their challenges and can change the game for them.
Craig Carl: There have been very few genuine innovations in on-premises storage recently; Zadara is going to change that. In the short term Zadara is going to solve two major challenges for our customers; true capacity on demand and data mobility to the cloud.
Recent innovations in the way customers acquire and consume compute resources; capacity on demand, advanced accounting and bill back, workload isolation, and very granular, role based permissions all have analogs in the storage ecosystem that traditional, large storage vendors aren’t delivering to their customers. I’m excited about helping Zadara develop and deliver these new solutions.
