Zadara Adds NVMe to Storage as a Service Platform

Zadara Storage has made high-performance NVMe storage a new component of its Zadara storage as a service (STaaS) platform, giving partners the benefit of offering NVMe as a service to their end user customers.

By adding NVMe capabilities to its fully managed, hybrid cloud enterprise STaaS platform, Zadara says it is working to make it easier for customers to gain the benefits of faster NVMe storage without the associated higher upfront costs of buying it outright. Under Zadara’s subscription plan, partners can sell the new services to customers as needed, saving them money and reducing their capital expenditures.

The NVMe storage capabilities bring faster performance and data access, reduced power consumption and lower latency by removing the bottlenecks created by legacy storage interfaces. By offering it as a service, it can now be an operational expense, making it more affordable for a wide range of users and potentially expanding its use, according to Zadara.

The improved Zadara platform also now includes optimized object storage for performance hungry applications such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, video-on-demand and more.

Marc Leavitt, senior director of product marketing for Zadara, told Channel Futures that the new capabilities enhance the company’s services for users, who can upgrade to it after it is released without any upgrade costs from the current all-flash storage services.

For channel partners, the benefits include being able to bring new offerings to market quickly and without having to build their own complex storage architectures.

“The service reduces risk and expense, enhances the customer experience and generally improves a reseller’s quality of life,” said Leavitt. “What we do is hard, and it’s taken us approximately eight years to get to this level. Our upgrade flexibility is completely unmatched in the industry and it makes selling Zadara easier, more pleasant and more profitable.”

Tina Gravel, senior vice president for channels at Cyxtera, said Zadara continues to be a great partner and lauded the company for continuing to innovate with its new NVMe storage as a service capabilities.

Viewpoint Research’s Cyndi Privett

Storage analyst Cyndi Privett of Viewpoint Research said Zadara’s move to NVMe storage is an advancement for customers and partners.

“Zadara is offering what a significant percentage of channel partners deeply need, which is the flexibility to accommodate a wide range of client requirements — on-premises or as a service,” said Privett. “Zadara is in rare company in allowing channel partners to white-label its offer and co-manage it. This is a real plus for MSPs trying to simplify their offerings.”

Also important, she said, is that Zadara’s simple compensation mechanism for partners delivers bottom-line benefits without a laundry list of hoops to jump through.

In July, Zadara refreshed its channel partner program with new sales and support tools, an improved partner portal, and brought in its first three distributors to help make it easier for partners to sell the company’s enterprise storage-as-a-service offerings. The updated program was the first big revamp since the company was founded in 2011 and adds a two-tier partner system for the first time in Zadara’s history.