Zadara Reviews

We have a significant amount of data that is stored and retained. We have a rolling 365 days' worth of data. There are about 35,000 to 45,000 events per second that come into this solution and then get stored, long-term. That data also needs to be readily accessible, meaning that it can be searched on at any point in time. We have real-time security metrics that are run against that volume of data, so we need the data to not only be persistent and stored long-term, but also on fast storage arrays that can be readily accessed in a minimal amount of time. We've leveraged Zadara to house that storage as well as have it available to us so that we can query it very quickly.

One of the main benefits is being able to scale up as needed, on-demand, without having to invest in any sort of hardware costs. If we were to get a large client, a Fortune 500 or Fortune 100, that had a significant number of assets or data they were looking to monitor, being able to scale on-demand and increase the drives behind the scenes is something that we can do in a matter of minutes today. If we were to manage that ourselves, it would take time to spin up those drives or to make those purchases and then get them configured and onboarded. We can now do that with the click of a button.

Zadara performs proactive monitoring and that includes any alerts or support tickets that are created within the system. For instance, if there is some sort of performance issue due to increasing ingestion or increasing storage consumption, or there are any other issues behind the scenes, all that is monitored. It creates an automated ticket that also goes to their team and one of their customer support individuals will reach out. We, obviously, have our own security monitoring on top of that, as well as performance monitoring, but we certainly work closely with Zadara and their support team in responding to any events that are generated. But they have the ability to go in and help mitigate any of the items that do come up.

It always helps having additional monitoring capabilities or individuals, especially when their focus is primarily on the data storage and the volumes behind the scenes, to ensure that everything's healthy and functioning. It's always good to have multiple layers there, in terms of visibility. But one of the key benefits that we have received is being able to respond quicker. We can open up a support ticket and ask them to make a change on our behalf, or to add additional storage, or to increase speed somewhere. They leverage their team to perform those things on our behalf and that saves our team from having to do it. They've been able to reduce the management overhead for us because we can offload some of those responsibilities to them.

It's pretty hard to compare performance levels to when we previously managed things ourselves, since we have grown significantly within the last five years and especially year-over-year. But we've probably seen an increase in performance of at least 100 to 200 percent. We've shifted workloads from SATAs all the way to SSDs. We've been able to go from a single GB to 10 GBs so performance-wise we're in a completely different arena. That being said, we've also doubled and tripled our event ingestion count. That has increased year-over-year with constant growth. So the performance demand has grown significantly. We're not only able to keep up with that but exceed that, year-over-year. We can scale resources, increase the network, decrease latency, increase the speed and the amount of CPUs and the amount of memory on those virtual private storage arrays, as well, as needed.

We've also been able to leverage some of the private compute. They're scaling up their compute so that you can actually spin up servers and instances closer to your storage, all within Zadara. That has been a tremendous benefit to us in increasing performance and reducing latency. I've been impressed with all of those features, and that capability is fairly new here. Staying cutting edge and providing additional services is something that's been very helpful to us as well.

In terms of data center footprint, we were able to take everything from our security operations center that was on-premises, and all of our co-lo's, and move all that into Zadara's management. That was definitely one of our primary objectives. They've been able to take over all the overhead that goes along with managing the backend infrastructure. It has been tremendously helpful in that regard.

Compared to us trying to do this ourselves, we've probably seen about 50 to 60 percent in cost savings over the last five years.

Zadara provides us with storage, similar to the way IaaS does.

We have a data center in Miami and we need off-site storage, so we connect to Zadara through the Equinix Cloud Exchange, which is a dark fiber. It essentially bypasses the internet and allows many different Equinix data centers to connect to one another. Since we are on that particular network, Zadara is one of the service providers that allow us to consume services from them.

Essentially, we connect Miami to Ashburn, Virginia, and this is where we have a storage environment that can grow as quickly or as slowly as we need it to. Today, our use case is offloading our backups onto that storage, as well as doing a replication to our other data center, which is on the West coast.

The fact that we have offsite storage that is provided to us using iSCSI as a service has allowed me to offload certain storage-related workloads into Zadara. This means that when I have a planned failover, if I need to maintain the local storage that I have in my data center, I simply shift all of the new incoming traffic into Zadara storage. None of my customers even know that it has happened. In this regard, it allows us to scale in an infinite way because we do not have to keep adding more capacity inside our physical data center, which includes power, networking, footprint, and so on. The fact that Zadara handles all of that for me behind the scenes, somewhere in Virginia, is my biggest selling point.

With its dedicated cores and memory, we feel that Zadora provides us with a single-tenant experience. This is important for us because we are aware that in the actual physical environment, where Zadara is hosting our data, they have other clients. Yet, the fact that we have not had any kind of performance issues, and we don't have the noisy neighbor concept, feels like we are the only ones on that particular storage area network (SAN). It's really important for us.

Zadara provides drive options such as SSD and NL-SAS, as well as SSD cache, and this has been important for us. These options allow us to decide for different volumes, what kind of services we're going to be running on them. For example, if it happens to be a database that requires fast throughput, then we will choose a certain type of drive. If we require volume, but not necessarily performance, then we can choose another drive.

A good thing about Zadara is you do not buy a solution that is fixed at the time of purchase. For instance, if I buy an off-the-shelf storage area network, then whatever that device can do at the time of purchase, give or take one or two upgrades, is where I am. With Zadara, they always improve and they always add more functionalities and more capacities.

One example is that when we became customers, their largest drives were only nine terabytes in size. A year or so later, they improved the technology and they now have 14 terabyte drives available, which is good at almost a 50% increase. It is helpful because we were able to take advantage of those higher densities and higher capacities. We were able to migrate our volumes from the nine terabyte drives to the 14 terabyte drives pretty much without any downtime and without any kind of interruption to service. This type of scalability, and the fact that you are future-proofing your purchase or your operations, is another great advantage that we see with Zadara.

As far as I know, Zadara integrates with all of the public cloud providers. The fact that they are physically located in the vicinity of public cloud regions is a major selling point for them. From my perspective, it is not yet very important because we are not in the public cloud. We have our own private cloud in Miami, and not part of Amazon or Azure. This means that for us, the fact that they happen to be in Virginia next to Amazon does not play a major role. That said, they are in a place where there is a lot of connectivity, so in that regard, there is an advantage. We are not benefiting from the fact that they are playing nice with public clouds, simply because we are not in the public cloud, but I'm sure that's an advantage for many others who are.

Absolutely, we are taking advantage of the fact that they integrate with private clouds.

Zadara saves me money in a couple of ways. One is that my operational costs are very consistent. The second is that the system is consistent and reliable, and this avoids a lot of the headaches that are associated with downtime, reputation, and all of that. So, knowing that we have a reputable, reliable, and consistent vendor on our side, that to me is important.

It is difficult to estimate how much we have saved because it wouldn't be comparing apples to apples. We would be buying a system versus paying for it operationally and I don't really have those kinds of numbers off-hand. Of course, I cannot put a price tag on my reputation.

We are a managed service provider. We are basically working in a data center environment, managing the data of our customers. The number of our clients is around 100 today.

We use iSCSI and Object multi-protocols. These simplify our operations a lot because otherwise we would need a lot of different products or interconnections. With Zadara Storage Cloud, all of this is just one type of connection. It works only with Ethernet, which means no Fibre Channel nor other protocols, like InfiniBand. It is just Ethernet, which is easy and simple. You can just use the protocols that you need. Today, this means we are not using NFS. But, never say never. Probably tomorrow or one day, if someone would just ask us to implement something mounted via NFS, we are ready to go. This is good because we don't need to buy another hardware or additional features. The best part is the fact that the cost covers everything, so you don't have to activate features by license, e.g., we don't need to pay more to activate NFS, CIFS, or iSCSI because we are not using them today. We still have them. So, we are free to use them whenever we want, which is good.

All our customers report the same story when we ask for a case study. With Zadara Storage Cloud, you simplify the management, which is absolutely true. 

Zadara Storage Cloud's agility is the most important part because all customers want agility today. Everyone wants quick answers, support, and features as well as the ability to provide storage with just some clicks or a simple request. 

Zadara Storage Cloud is elastic in all directions. We create a lot of events (marketing events, technical events, and public speaking) with VMware. They have always been available to sponsor, participate, or just integrate their experience. Even with features, we requested some specific features for the Italian market, then they just put them into the roadmap, which was great.

We are a disaster recovery company and we used Zadara as a storage platform for all of our disaster recovery solutions. We do not make use of the computing and networking services they offer. Rather, we only use the storage facility.

Our main environment is Zadara Storage, and then we have multiple VMware and Hyper-V virtual clusters that run the services we provide to our customers. We've also got numerous recovery platforms as well, which we can recover customer's environments onto. Zadara is a key underpinning of that because, without that common storage layer and the services running on top of that, we wouldn't have a business to run.

It's key for us, as a DR specialist, that we have the confidence that all of our systems and services are available all the time. Picking a vendor, be it Zadara or any other vendor, is really important to us because we have to trust that they're going to be there 24/7, every day.

We use Zadara as a multi-tenanted experience and it is key to us that we have dedicated resources for each tenant because it maintains a consistent level of performance, regardless of how it scales.

The fact that Zadara provides drive options such as SSD and NL-SAS, as well as SSD Cache, is very important because we need that kind of performance in our recovery environments. For example, when the system is used in anger by a customer, it's critical that it's able to perform there and then. This is a key point for us.

At the moment, we don't use the NFS or CIFS protocols. We are, however, big users of iSCSI and Object, and the ability to just have one single solution that covers all of those areas was important to us. I expect that we will be using NFS and CIFS in the future, but that wasn't a day-one priority for us.

The importance of multi-protocol support stems from the fact that historically, we've had to buy different products to support specific use cases. This meant purchasing equipment from different vendors to support different storage workloads, such as Object or File or Block protocols. Having everything all in one was very attractive to us and furthermore, as we retired old equipment, it can all go onto one central platform.

Another important point is that having a single vendor means it's a lot easier for us to support. Our engineers only need to have experience on one storage platform, rather than the three or four that we've previously had to have.

It is important to us that Zadara integrates with all of the public cloud providers, as well as private clouds because what we're starting to see now, especially in the DR business, is the adoption of hybrid working from our customers. As they move into the cloud, they want to utilize our services in the same way. Because Zadara works exactly the same way in a public cloud as it does on-premises, it's a seamless move for us. We don't have to do anything clever or look at alternative products to support it.

It is important to us that this solution can be configured for on-premises, co-location, and cloud environments because it provides us with a seamless experience. It is really helpful that we have one solution that stretches across on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud systems that looks and works the same.

An example of how Zadara has benefited our company is that during the lockdown due to the global pandemic, we've had a big surge in demand for our products. The ability of Zadara to ramp up quickly and expand the system seamlessly has been a key selling point for us, and it's somewhat fueled our growth. As our customer take-up has grown, Zadara's been the backbone in helping us to cope with that increased demand and that increased capacity.

It's been really easy to do, as well. They've been really easy to work with, and we've substantially increased our usage of Zadara. Even though we've only been using it for just about five months, in that time, we've deployed four Zadara systems across four different data centers. Their servicing capacity has been available within about four weeks of saying, "Can you do this?" and them saying "Yes, we can."

With respect to our recovery solutions, using Zadara has perhaps doubled the performance of what we had before. A bit of that is because it's a newer technology, and a bit of that is also in the way we can scale the engine workload. When the workload is particularly high, we can upgrade the engine, in-place, to be a higher-performance engine, and then when the workload scales down, we can drop back to a lower-performance one. 

That flexibility in the performance of not only being able to take advantage of the latest flash technology but also being able to scale the power of the storage engines, up and down as needed, has been really good for us.

Using Zadara has not at the moment helped to reduce our data center footprint, although I expect that it will do so in the future. In fact, at this point, we've taken up more data center footprint to install Zadara, but within six months we will have removed a lot of the older systems. It takes time to migrate our data but the expectation is that we will probably save between 25% and 30%, compared to our previous footprint.

This solution has had a significant effect on our budgeting. Previously, we would have had to spend money as a capital expense to buy storage. Now, it's an operational expense and I don't need to go and find hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy a new storage system. That's helped tremendously with our budgeting.

Compared to the previous solution, we are expecting a saving of about 40% over five years. When we buy new equipment, our write-down period is five years. So, once we've bought it, it has to earn its keep in that time. Using Zadara has not only saved us money but it will continue to save us money over the five years.

It has saved us in terms of incurring costs because I haven't had to spend the money all upfront, and I'm effectively spreading the cost over the five years. We do see an advantage in that the upfront capital costs are eliminated and overall, we expect between 30% and 40% savings over the lifetime if we'd had to buy the equipment.

Our customers are using Zadara for their research and development environments. We provide infrastructure for government projects, but we are often not fully aware of their specific usage. 

I typically use it for our infrastructure and offer both Zadara and Microsoft Azure to our customers.

Zadara provides storage and a load balancer, which improves storage management efficiency. It's a user-friendly platform, both for our customers and our engineering team.

We are running Zadara in three of our data centers.

We're a data protection organization so we back up a lot of customer's data. We use Zadara largely in one of three ways. This first is an Object storage platform in our data centers, the second is for Block storage, for a specific product that we have, and the third is for on-premise customer object storage. In the third case, when we're backing up a large amount of data from a customer's site, we put a local Zadara appliance on that customer's site as well.

Our initial application was probably the simplest one. We were sunsetting a product, but we needed to do some movement and we needed some additional storage, but we knew that what we needed was going to change within six months as we got rid of one product and brought in another. To handle this, we started deploying Block storage with Zadara, which we then changed to Object storage and effectively sent back the drives related to the Block storage as we did that migration. This meant that we did not have to invest in new technology or different platforms but rather, we could do it all on one platform and we can manage that migration very easily.

We use Zadara for most of our storage and it provides us with a single-tenant experience. We have a lot more customer environments running on it and although we don't use the compute services at the moment, we do use it for multi-tenant deployment for all of our storage.

I appreciate that they also offer compute services. Although we don't use it at the moment, it is something that we're looking at.

The fact that Zadara provides drive options such as SSD, NL-SAS, and SSD Cache is really useful for us. Much like in the way we can offer different deployments to our customers, having different drive sizes and different drive types means that we can mix and match, depending on customer requirements at the time they come in.

With available protocols including NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI, Zadara supports all of the main things that you'd want to support.

In terms of integration, Zadara supports all of the public and private clouds that we need it to. I'm not sure if it supports all of them on the market, but it works for everything that we require. This is something that is important to us because of the flexibility we have in that regardless of whether our customers are on-premises, in AWS, or otherwise, we can use Zadara storage to support that.

I would characterize Zadara's solution as elastic in all directions. There clearly are some limits to what technology can do, but from Zadara's perspective, it's very good.

With respect to performance, it was not a major factor for us so I don't know whether Zadara improved it or not. Flexibility around capacity is really the key aspect for us.

Zadara has not actually helped us to reduce our data center footprint but that's because we're adding a lot more customers. Instead, we are growing. It has helped us to redeploy people to more strategic projects. This is not so true with the budget, since it was factored in, but we do focus on more strategic projects.

We have several use cases for this product. Zadara provides the hardware and we build our services that are hosted on it.

They are responsible for building out the cloud hardware infrastructure and for us, it's a number of nodes and a number of disks attached to those nodes, with compute to manage everything. It also includes network infrastructure like switches for our data center.

They shipped all of the hardware to us, we installed it, and then we began to provide services with the support of Zadara. They share responsibility in management, providing the monitoring and management and the backend operations.

In some cases, we have just sold pure storage to our partners and customers. In other cases, what we provide is Infrastructure as a Service, which includes compute off of another platform that we have that isn't from Zadara, and the backend storage is with Zadara.

We also provide other services, including Backup as a Service. We provide the service with Veem as the backup solution. The backups are taken from the customer's environment and put onto Zadara storage in our data center.

We also offer disaster recovery as a service, where we provide the compute and the storage for disaster scenarios. A customer can spin up their entire environment on the VMs in our compute, and then their data is backed up and snapshotted into our storage on Zadara.

Having dedicated cores and memory absolutely provides us with a single-tenant experience. We have use cases in both categories, but we have customers who have a completely dedicated and private environment and it is particularly important for them. For example, if they are dealing with medical or patient data then they have a dedicated core and a dedicated disk, which is essentially their own private cloud.

It is important that we also have the flexibility for some of the lower-end services that we can have multi-tenant storage because not all of our clients require completely dedicated cores and disk space.

It is very important to us that Zadara provides various drive options because we're more of a niche cloud player, and we don't compete with Azure, AWS, or other large providers. We tend to have bespoke solutions, so having the different drive options gives us the flexibility we need to do that.

Zadara has improved our business with the main benefit being that we generate quite a bit of revenue every month from the services that we provide others, and I don't think that would have been possible without this product. What really attracted us to Zadara was the fact that they have the pay as you grow model.

As a new cloud provider, say three years ago, it would have been quite a large investment for us to take on. Not just in the hardware but also in the skills and the knowledge required to set up and operate it. Zadara was a key enabler for us to be able to enter the cloud business because if it wasn't for them, it would have taken us a lot longer. We would have had to invest in more people and as well in more hardware. As it is now, we are generating revenue and it gives us some credibility with our larger customer base.

Although we only use cloud storage services, Zadara is an agile solution that offers compute and networking, as well. This agility means that they are very quick at turning things around, which is key for us because we're able to implement solutions for customers quite quickly. Ultimately, we can start bringing in revenue for sales quite fast, as opposed to some of our traditional business. 

If you take fiber, for example, it could take up to three months to realize the value of the sale before it actually starts to build. Whereas with Zadara, it is so agile and so quick and easy to set up that even in a few days, we can turn a sale around into billing. This quick conversion from sale to revenue is also important for the business.

We didn't have a cloud before we had Zadara so, in that regard, it has increased our performance by 100%. In fact, we have been able to redeploy people and budgets to more strategic projects because it helped us to enter the cloud environment and to offer new services to our customers.

We are using Zadara for our non-critical storage needs. We use both their block storage and also their NAS capabilities.

It provides very satisfactory storage performance, however, we don't use it for mission-critical applications.