Traditionally, enterprise IT had to buy their own expensive hardware. Then, the cloud came along and showed us that it doesn’t have to be that way. In the cloud, you eliminate the CapEx investment and rigidity of physical storage purchases. The cloud provides significant flexibility to grow and shrink as needed. If your business requirements change, you can adjust your IT resources accordingly. Additionally, there is no need to worry about hardware in the cloud because providers take complete responsibility for making sure everything works, including hardware and software deployment and upgrades – all behind the scenes.
Naturally, CIOs and IT administrators started asking themselves if the cloud’s flexibility could be had on-premises. While they continue to enjoy the experience that the public cloud provides, certain data sets and workloads simply cannot, or must not, be stored in the cloud. Before the cloud came along (AWS, in particular), CIOs were appropriately skeptical of the relevance and financial feasibility of on-premises services. In fact, these services had been very expensive up until recently, because they entailed the use of costly equipment that was specifically purchased for each customer, marked up and combined with service and management fees.
So What Has Changed?
Two major things have changed to make on-premises services attractive. Firstly, with software defined storage, hardware is standard, manufactured in very large volumes, and therefore no longer expensive. Secondly, providers offer cloud and on-premises services simultaneously, and can prove that their economies of scale result in significant and direct cost savings for their customers. When a provider offers only on-premises services, each added customer results in much more work. However, if the same provider is already operating and remotely managing a global network, adding sites is simply part of its daily routine, and each site represents a small marginal effort.
We, at Zadara Storage, are able to support our customers with both cloud-based and on-premises storage. Our service was architected to remotely manage storage across many sites, reliably and efficiently. Our sophisticated Software Defined Storage architecture was designed to take advantage of affordable, industry-standard hardware while maintaining the highest levels of availability in the industry. Therefore, it’s easy for us to deliver a financially attractive, enterprise-class storage service inside any private location worldwide. We have over 40 locations, both public and private, across the globe, and are continually adding more.
How it Works
As mentioned above, the Zadara storage solution can be sent to a location of your choice and is architected for extreme reliability. We are responsible for all software and hardware operations, configuration and maintenance. We monitor the storage 24-hours a day, providing updates and tuning as part of our service. If an upgrade needs to be performed or if hardware fails, we are on top of it.
The system is redundant, reliable and self-healing. It continues to run in the face of hardware failures, which means that, in general, such failures do not require urgent handling. Rather, our remote monitors detect that a physical component needs to be replaced, we ship over the replacement parts, and customers replace them at their convenience. Because we use standard hardware that is simple to maintain, these operations are straightforward and can be performed by our customers’ own technicians. This keeps costs low for everyone and is compatible with those customers whose security policies prevent them from admitting an external technician onto their premises
Pay-Per-Use
Our system is very easily expandable, so it doesn’t require over-provisioning. We send additional capacity as our customers require it. Customers don’t pay for the hardware we send, but rather for how much of it they actually use. If they need more, we send more; if they need less, they pay less. If they need less for an extended period of time or permanently, they can even return the excess hardware. All of these changes take place non-disruptively. This is all thanks to our advanced software’s flexibility and scalability.
Summary
With Zadara Storage, you can enjoy all of the benefits of the cloud, including pay-as-you-go, flexibility, remote management, and continuous operations. We understand that enterprises need hardware on-demand and have made this concept easy and affordable. When you take cloud thinking and apply it to on-premises environments, good things happen.
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