Zadara Storage as a Service Now Available Through Cyxtera Data Centers

Cyxtera customers can now get integrated Zadara storage-as-a-service capabilities directly through Cyxtera’s 62 hybrid-ready data centers.

The partnership aims to help customers save money by offering storage on demand, rather than through capital purchases.

Zadara’s Greg Newman

“Organizations are looking for solutions that reduce financial and operational risks that can come from long-term contracts, minimum commitments and managing multiple storage solutions,” Greg Newman, Zadara’s vice president of marketing, told Channel Futures. “With [Zadara’s] storage as a service, organizations can get a technology refresh without capex costs, or create a private cloud with all the capabilities of Cyxtera’s data centers.”

The Zadara storage services are housed natively within Cyxtera data centers and can be accessed through Cyxtera’s Marketplace. The offering allows customers to pay for the storage they need without making long-term infrastructure investments. Using the services, customers gain access to multitier storage as a service in the cloud.

The storage services include encryption and isolated workloads for security, as well as options for block, file or object storage. Also available are snapshots, mirrors, thin provisioning and more.

Customers can use the services on Cyxtera-hosted public, private or hybrid clouds.

The new offering gives channel partners and service providers new opportunities to serve their storage customers, said Newman. Partners “can offer a solution that reduces risks associated with enterprise storage and the cost of hardware ownership.”

“Zadara offers a 100% opex storage-as-a-service model to organizations around the world,” said Newman. “Zadara offers the ability to actually shrink your usage on-demand in an easy to consume, pay-as-you-go model. This is valuable for all organizations that require flexibility and the freedom to only pay for what they use.”

What Analysts Say

Steve McDowell, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, said Zadara recognized the need for storage as a service early in the market.

Moor Insights & Strategy’s Steve McDowell

“They have an offering that sits between the basic storage functionality offered by the public cloud providers and the full control that you’d get with a storage array racked in your own data center,” said McDowell.

Nearly every major storage provider now has some kind of storage-as-a-service offering, he said.

“IT buyers are responding,” said McDowell. “Infrastructure as a service, including storage, is a great model for all involved. It delivers IT shops a full-featured storage experience with the flexibility to adjust capacity as needed, while not forcing capital expenditures to make that happen.”

At the same time, storage as a service is particularly attractive to channel providers like Cyxtera, he said.

“It allows them to provide a value-added service, one that IT buyers are responding to, while also ensuring a nice amount of deferred revenue from the future billing cycles. It’s a residual model for the channel,” said McDowell.

The market has become more crowded with large companies like HPE GreenLake, Dell and Pure Storage, he added.

“What makes Zadara interesting in the face of those competitors is they don’t have a legacy infrastructure business to protect. They have been channel-first with storage-as-a-service for a long time,” noted McDowell.

Another analyst, Rob Enderle of Enderle Group, said variety in IT services is critical because not all customers are the same.

“Adding this storage-as-a-service offering provides additional depth to what a channel partner can provide. It helps them better embrace the variety of potential opportunities in their chosen market,” he said.