As companies scramble to cope with an exponentially growing amount of data they have to deal with, the cloud-based STaaS (Storage as a Service) model has been gathering momentum. Businesses are beginning to investigate how to switch from CapEx to OpEx in your own datacenter. IT Brand Pulse projects that by 2020 STaaS will command fully half the storage marketplace, rising to 80 percent by 2023.
With STaaS, storage consumers don’t have to use hard-to-obtain capital funding (CapEx) to buy storage equipment. Instead, they purchase storage services using OpEx funds and simply pay a monthly fee to a managed services vendor based on the type and amount of storage they actually use. With CapEx virtually eliminated, and OpEx spending also, in most cases, being lower, the STaaS model can result in a substantial reduction in a company’s total cost of ownership for storage.
OpEx vs. CapEx: Side by Side Comparison — Which is Better for Your Business? Download the Infographic
But even with a lower TCO, as well as other important advantages such as storage management simplicity, easy and almost infinite scalability, and enhanced flexibility in meeting changing demands for the amounts and types of storage required by constantly evolving workloads, some companies remain reluctant to embrace the STaaS model. The biggest reason for that is their concern about the safety and security of data that’s housed in the public cloud.
Why You Might Want To Keep Your Data In-house
For many organizations, the fear of placing closely held information in cloud-based storage makes a lot of sense. For example, when it comes to data that involves the personally identifiable information of customers or employees, or company financial information, or data for which there are regulatory compliance requirements, the impact of losing control over that information can be extreme. In such cases, IT managers are often highly motivated to keep their data protected behind the company’s own firewall.
Organizations that require 24/7 access to data may also have concerns about using cloud storage. As was demonstrated by the widespread, four-hour long internet outage caused by a single typo at Amazon Web Services, cloud-based services are vulnerable to unexpected disruptions.
Other concerns may include cloud latency and I/O performance issues, and, for some industries, laws that regulate where data can be stored. Whatever the particular issue may be, many companies have very legitimate reasons for keeping their data safely on their own premises.
But, does that mean they must forego the benefits of the STaaS model? At one time that was the case, but no longer. In 2014 Zadara Storage pioneered a new approach, called On-Premises as a Service (OPaaS), that offers all the benefits of STaaS while keeping a company’s storage infrastructure securely within its own walls.
How OPaaS Works
With OPaaS, a storage services vendor installs hardware and software onsite in the customer’s own data center. Just as with a cloud-based STaaS approach, the customer has no up front CapEx costs for storage equipment, and simply pays a monthly fee for the amount of storage actually used. With, in Zadara’s case, no more than a six month commitment, the vendor provides, maintains, and manages the storage infrastructure for as long as the customer wants the service. Equipment upgrades and provision of additional storage capacity as needed are part of the offering. Ben Woo, managing director at the market research firm Neuralytix, describes OPaaS as “an elastic, managed NAS and SAN with cloud capabilities built on top of it.”
As with STaaS, OPaaS allows a company to shift from CapEx to OpEx spending for its storage services. And the fact that customers pay only for the amount of storage they actually use, no matter how much hardware may be installed on the premises, means that even those monthly OpEx costs are minimized. The vendor automatically, and at no cost to the customer, delivers additional storage resources when needed, relieving IT managers of the onerous task of accurately predicting future storage needs so as to have reserve capacity on hand if and when the demand for it develops. An OPaaS implementation can quickly and transparently scale to hundreds of petabytes and beyond.
Should You Consider OPaaS?
Acceptance of the OPaaS paradigm is growing fast. One Zadara customer, California Polytechnic State University, has reaped substantial benefits by switching over to OPaaS. A report describing the school’s experience cites its new on-premises storage solution as having “solved numerous management, scalability and performance issues.” Steve Donaghue, Director of Hosting Services at Starcom, states, “We found Zadara’s On-Premise as-a-Service offering to be far more flexible and cost-effective than the EMC and NetApp products we had been using.”
If you’d like to explore how moving to an OPaaS solution could be the answer to your company’s current and future storage needs, we’d be happy to help. Please download our latest analyst paper: Zadara Storage Voted by IT Pros as On-Premise Enterprise Storage-as-a-Service Market Leader.
