Guest post from Zadara Storage

It is evident that the future data center will be based on cutting-edge software and virtualization technologies to make the most effective use of hardware, compute power, and storage needs to perform essential analytics and to increase the performance of media-related and advanced web applications. And it turns out that the wires that will connect all this technology together are no less crucial to next-generation data centers and clouds than the software and virtualization layers that run within them. 

There are multiple storage fabrics and interconnects available today, including Fibre Channel, Ethernet and SAS. Each has various pros and cons, and fabrics were chosen according to need of performance, compatibility and cost efficiencies. 

As an enterprise storage as-a-service provider, delivering a software-based cloud storage solution for public, private and hybrid cloud models based on commodity hardware, Zadara Storage provides storage as-a-service in multiple public cloud and colocation facilities around the globe. Consistency, high availability and predictability are key in supplying the scalable, elastic service our customers expect, regardless of their location, facility or the public cloud they employ. The hardware we use needs to be dependable, pervasive and cost-efficient in order to sustain the performance and cost-level of our service, anywhere and at any scale.

When choosing our fabric, Ethernet came as a clear choice. Ethernet is likely to become the new standard, and boasts several advantages vital to our product:

  • Ethernet's speed roadmap is aggressive: from 10GbE to 40GbE, and upcoming 100GbE
  • Ethernet is ubiquitous: we can employ it with no complication at any data center or colocation facility around the globe
  • The latency we have found to be more than manageable, specifically as we use advanced techniques such as IO virtualization and data passthrough
  • Ethernet is the most cost effective: an as-a-service company needs to have a competitive pricing edge.

The future of enterprise storage
The future of Enterprise Storage lies in software and a choice of hardware (premium or commodity). Software-defined storage can scale performance more easily and cost effectively than monolithic hardware, and by combining the best of hardware of software, the customer wins. Ethernet is a critical element of our infrastructure, and Mellanox switches offer significant higher performance and consistent dependability that enables our storage fabric and meets our customer’s needs.

Zadara Storage at the Mellanox Booth at VMworld 2013
Wednesday, August 28, at 2:15pm
At the Mellanox Booth at VMworld 2013, Zadara Storage CEO, Nelson Nahum, will present the Zadara™ Storage Cloud, based on the patent-pending CloudFabric™ architecture, and providing a breakthrough cost structure for data centers. Zadara’s software-defined solution employs standard, off-the-shelf x86 servers, and utilizes Ethernet as its only interconnect to provide performant, reliable, SSD- and spindle-based SAN and NAS as a service.

About Zadara Storage
An Amazon Web Services and Dimension Data Technology Partner and winner of the VentureBeat, Tie50, Under the Radar, and Plug and Play cloud competitions, Zadara Storage offers enterprise-class storage for the cloud in the form of Storage as a Service (STaaS). With Zadara Storage, cloud storage leapfrogs ahead to provide cloud servers with high-performance, fully configurable, highly available, fully private, tiered SAN and NAS as a service. By combining the best of enterprise storage with the best of cloud and cloud block storage, Zadara Storage accelerates the cloud by enabling enterprises to migrate existing mission-critical applications to the Cloud.