Zadara’s Enterprise Storage as a Service (STaaS) adds support For Microsoft Azure Cloud

The news represents what Zadara believes is an industry first – the first multi-cloud capable SAN and NAS as a service offering that frees IT managers to provision and deploy once to Zadara’s platform, and then to attach the same storage to Microsoft Azure and other public cloud offerings such as AWS. Zadara’s multi-cloud capabilities in its built-for-the-cloud Virtual Private Storage Array™ (VPSA™) offering enable the Microsoft Azure community to support advanced applications such as Microsoft SQL clusters in the cloud, remote asynchronous replication with 1-minute recovery point objective (RPO) support, SSD read/write caching, and backup/recovery and business continuity needs.

As multi-cloud moves from a buzzword to real-world deployment, Zadara’s enterprise Storage as a Service for Microsoft Azure enables enterprise applications to unleash the scalability and superior economics of the public cloud, without the hassles often associated with supporting traditional storage architectures.
“Azure ExpressRoute offers more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies and higher security that enable deployment of high-performance, massive applications within private networks,” said Steven Martin, General Manager, Microsoft Azure. “We are very excited to see Zadara extend the capabilities of Azure for our mutual customers.”

With Zadara’s enterprise STaaS, IT managers now can deploy seamlessly across the leading public clouds of their choosing – at Microsoft Azure or AWS– without rewrites or hassles, knowing they can access superior enterprise-grade storage capabilities and still pay with a pure OpEx model not CapEx, by the hour, without long term commitments or up-front fees. This flexibility applies even to those high-availability, high IOPS applications that formerly exceeded the storage capabilities of the public cloud – applications that now are easily provisioned and run with the hallmark high QoS, low latency attachment to Microsoft Azure VMs, and global footprint for which Zadara’s is famous.

Zadara’s Virtual Private Storage Arrays are colocated at Equinix facilities that are designated as Azure ExpressRoute exchange sites and feature high speed fibre lines directly connected to Microsoft Azure. All Zadara customers’ drives are private and not shared with anyone else, so Zadara users can obtain single-tenant performance at multitenant prices and avoid the “noisy neighbour” problem (which occurs in competing services when other customers degrade storage performance). Expansion to more drives, adjusting Azure ExpressRoute’s bandwidth to VMs, or switching from disks to SSDs is as simple as clicking a button on the dedicated online management interface provided to each customer. At any time Zadara users can also eliminate drives, adjust controller performance, and fine tune other storage needs on the fly – allowing agility and control in a flexible, pay-as-you-go model.

“Now Microsoft Azure-based enterprises can have it all – elastic, high-QoS NAS and SAN for their most demanding applications, made affordable, highly performant, and available worldwide by Zadara’s proven storage as a service offering,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage.