The cloud offers unprecedented flexibility and agility, but it’s still full of shortcomings that have made migrating existing Enterprise applications to the public cloud either impossible, or extremely complicated and full of performance, availability and management compromises.
One of the greatest things about AWS is its rich, bountiful ecosystem of services. Solutions such as our own help customers to do so much more in AWS and specifically enable them to migrate Enterprise applications to the cloud, or support an easier and more effective disaster recovery strategy.
As AWS re:Invent approaches, we wanted to resurface a previous blog post and share four storage features that can enable you to run existing Enterprise applications at AWS using on-demand SAN & NAS Virtual Private Storage Arrays (VPSA). As a Storage Competency Partner of AWS, Zadara VPSA are treated as a local storage service. That means they don’t require extra AMIs, instances or VMs to deploy.
So let’s get to it!
1. Fully Featured Native NAS (NFS and CIFS): Create 100+ TB volumes with full data management!
One of the main challenges for many of our customers as they look to move to the cloud is the lack of enterprise-grade NFS and CIFS support. For important applications complicated file trees, populous directories, and large objects, one needs not only performance and reliability, but also one that provides for instant snapshots, clones, remote replication and data-at-rest encryption.
Zadara’s VPSA technology looks, performs and behaves just like an Enterprise NAS appliance with an NFS / CIFS server, dual HA controllers, dedicated high performance drives and those rich Enterprise class NAS features mentioned above, plus an exciting new feature to be announced at AWS re:Invent!
See how Realty Data Uses Zadara Storage and RightBrain Networks to bring a billion image files to AWS and how Swisstopo cut costs by 50% costs by scaling from 100 volumes to just 1 single volume, using Zadara at AWS, and Storage management can be just that simple for enterprise applications in the cloud.
2. Sleep better at night with 1-minute RPO: replicate across Availability Zones, Global Regions (and even to another provider!)
The most effective methods for protecting data are to create redundant copies using periodic differential backups and continuous replication. And to achieve true disaster recovery, one should replicate over a large distance to ensure data retention even in case of natural disasters or other localized downtime
Customers using our Virtual Private Storage Array SAN and NAS as a service at AWS can perform asynchronous remote replication to any of our global locations, including AWS US West, US East, Europe and Asia Pacific (Japan). With VPSA’s advanced data management features, customers can achieve a one-minute RPO with unlimited, low-impact snapshots and ensure protection for the most stringent demands. Replication is bi-directional replication so you can link, break and re-merge volumes as necessary.
No matter where you are in the world, you’re a reasonable replication distance from a Zadara data center – so that at the push of a button you can automatically replicate to many other places on the planet.
3. Get real QoS for truly Predictable Performance
‘Noisy neighbors’ still provides for some of the cloud’s biggest challenges as users experience performance degradation due to shared resources. Until Zadara came along, this affected vital applications, challenged SLAs, and kept the cloud from delivering on the mission critical needs of the enterprise. No longer. Our VPSA patent-pending architecture ensures isolated, dedicated resources for each user. You can tune your IO and throughput performance up and down according to your needs and budget, with consistent Quality of Service for your Amazon compute instances.
4. Choose your hardware – you can even take it home!
We’ve often referred to public cloud storage as a ‘blob’ (check out our animated video about cloud block storage) as customers generally receive generic storage with very little control over the hardware, resources or even location of their data. For enterprises to truly take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity, agility and enticing cost benefits, they not only need robust storage, that’s consistent, reliable and feature-rich, they also need to have granular control of their storage.
With Zadara’s service at AWS, you can build your Virtual Private Storage Array with your choice of dedicated resources – choose your drive type – SAS, SATA or SSD – drive capacity, and drive speed, as well as your ‘engine’ (a virtual controller with dedicated memory and processing power), at any chosen Zadara service location. Your hardware is dedicated to you and will not be shared with any other users. Your data will remain on your dedicated hardware as long as you use it, meaning that in extreme circumstances you could even buy your physical drives from us and physically remove them to ensure no data traces are left in the cloud
Zadara at re:Invent
Want to learn more? Come talk with us next week at re:Invent in booth #735. We’re going to be announcing even more exciting features that will be available to AWS customers, so make sure to follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest news.
