Zadara Highlights
- A privately owned storage company with funds from venture capital and Toshiba
- Nelson Nahum and team have lots of experience, including StorAge (acquired by LSI)
- VPSA delivers SAN and NAS
- Partners include eircom, KVH, Dimesion Data and CloudSigma
- Offers a pay-as-you-co Cloud approach for the storage you already have
We had a great discussion with Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara – a small storage company with lots of expertise offering a business model as opposed to startling new technology. You’ll want to learn more about its approach to providing enterprises with SAN and NAS storage at lower costs through Cloud integration.
Who Is Zadara?
Zadara is a private venture capital-backed storage company – $7 million from investors and $3 million from Toshiba. It employs just 14 people. Although new Nelson and other senior management have lots of experience, including running at StorAge, which was bought by LSI in 2006. It doesn’t publish its financial results, although Nelson claims it is experiencing a 100% quarter on quarter growth in both revenues and customer numbers.
What Does It Offer?
Zadara’s secret sauce is its Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA), which delivers block (SAN) and CIFS/NFS (NAS) storage, arguably a more useful approach to the proprietary APIs or object-based approaches of most Cloud storage providers. It has a multi-dimensional solutions approach. In particular it offers solutions by:
- Architecture including public Cloud, dedicated Cloud, private Cloud, Service Cloud and Hybrid Cloud
- Need including Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, High Availability, Storage as a Service, IaaS and Unified Storage
- Application including Big Data, Collaboration, Database, File and Virtualisation
- Industry including just about any one, but featuring Broadcast and Entertainment, eCommerce and Internet Services, Finance and Government
It produces its own arrays, taking a very different approach to Avere, who we featured recently.
Who Are Its Customers And Partners?
More than 40 firms including Toshiba currently use its solutions. Customer references are currently missing from its excellent site – we think it should add testimonials could help it get its credibility across to even more.
Toshiba’s investment came after it became a customer. It wanted ‘skin in the game’ according to Nelson. The relationship gives Zadara excellent prices on Toshiba SSD and hard disks, while the solutions are deployed to Toshiba’s internal and external customers.
Amazon offers Zadara solutions, with the arrays direct connected from co-location data centres.
NetApp sometimes refers its customers to Zadara as it has greater simplicity and lower capital costs than its own approach (where customers have to purchase an array).
Other partners include KVH, eircom. This week it announced the addition of Dimension Data and CloudSigma as partners.
Some Conclusions – Storage Is Not Always About New Technology
I talked to Nelson about the storage supplier dilemma – that the small innovative companies often get bought because they’re unable to persuade enough users to take the plunge and use something different: which means that they regularly get bought by the larger players and lose their sparkle. We also chatted about the predominance of SANs and Fibre Channel and the urgent need for Enterprises to adopt something cheaper. Zadara offers services which allow for rapid deployment with enough choices of location to help the most conservative Enterprise serve their current storage needs in a different way. It has plenty of customers and added credibility given its relationship with Toshiba. I expect we’ll hear more about them as they expand internationally.