This week, AWS launched larger, faster EBS volumes. Large, fast volumes attached to EC2 instances are something Zadara has been offering since 2012. Now that AWS is starting to catch up, is Zadara still the right choice for data at rest in AWS? Let’s check four important dimensions; size, speed, value, and features.
First, size.
The largest supported EBS volume is now 16 TB. That’s not small, but it is still far smaller than Zadara’s largest volume, which weighs in at 100TB. To get a 100 TB volume using native EBS you would have to stripe 7 (!) of these new 16TB volumes together.
Second, speed.
Since day one at Zadara we’ve supported SSD cached volumes and all SSD volumes so we’re fast; faster than any EBS volume.
Third, value.
There are a number of enterprise-grade attributes included in Zadara’s offerings that set us apart and enhance the bang our customers get for their buck. One example is support. Zadara’s service includes complimentary 24×7 support (including via phone), staffed by our own engineers. These engineers are with you from the first moment you make contact with us, through the testing phase (another complimentary offering), and throughout your relationship with Zadara. Another aspect is our SLA. Unlike most other providers who enumerate availability in “nines,” Zadara provides you a 100% data availability SLA and pays you back in the unlikely event of downtime, no matter how brief. Given all this value, it may surprise you to learn that, in this specific case the Zadara equivalent to AWS’s 16 TB, 20,000 IOPS volume costs hundreds less a month than Amazon charges.
Last, features.
Zadara offers a whole host of storage features that AWS does not – encryption of data at rest with customer-managed keys, automatic replication to other regions, automatic snapshot retention and rotation, replication to or from on-premises, volumes that grow online, Multi-Zone HA for highly available volumes, traditional cluster-compatible iSCSI volumes, NFS and CIFS shares, and more.
Zadara also features automatic, pushbutton backup to S3 (B2S3) and Zadara Container Services (ZCS) which provides Docker containers direct access to the storage for blazing fast performance.
If you are ready to take the next step, contact us at sales@zadarastorage.com or me directly at craig@zadarastorage.com.
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– Craig
