Transcript
Tech Brief
Zadara Storage VPSA – Virtual Private Storage Array Background Today, deploying applications on IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) in the cloud means virtual servers (compute), networking and storage. The storage piece is typically delivered on shared commodity infrastructure with relatively low throughput and performance. To address these cloud service provider shortcomings, Zadara Storage Inc (“Zadara”) has brought to market the Virtual Private Storage Array, or VPSA, which is both a hardware and software solution that provides additional functionality over CSPs standard storage offerings.
Company Zadara was founded in March 2011 by a number of storage industry veterans who had worked together previously at other storage-based companies including LSI. To date, the company has received two rounds of funding. Series A took place in July 2012 with $7 million from Genesis Capital Advisors and Platinum Management, plus two additional private investors. Twelve months later Toshiba invested a further $3 million. Zadara is based in Irvine, California, USA with a development centre in Nesher, Israel.
Product Offerings Zadara has a single product offering, the Virtual Private Storage Array or VPSA. VPSA delivers cloud computing customers dedicated storage resources within the data centre of their ISP using hardware acquired or rented by Zadara. At Amazon, for example the equipment is deployed in the Direct Connect co-location facility. Each customer is provided with a storage appliance
Industry
Cloud Storage
Founded
Israel, March 2011
Founder(s)
Robi Hartman Yair Hersheko Nelson Nahum Eli Shapira
Headquarters
Irvine, California and Nesher, Israel
Products
VPSA, Virtual Private Storage Array
Website
www.zadarastorage.com
Twitter
@zadarastorage
running in a virtual machine using shared physical resources. However storage (HDD and SSD) resources are dedicated to each customer to ensure isolated and guaranteed I/O performance. VPSAs provide both iSCSI and NFS/SMB host connectivity.
VPSA Features Key features of the VPSA product include the following: • Performance isolation - the ability to ensure each customer receives their expected performance levels and are not affected by the "noisy neighbour" problem. • Encryption - data is encrypted at rest, with customers maintaining encryption keys through enablement on the VPSA controllers. Data can also be encrypted in flight between host and iSCSI target using IPSec. • Multi-tenancy - the ability to support multiple users on the same infrastructure
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with isolated access to only the resources owned by that user. Billing - the VPSA platform has built in charging mechanisms and customers are charged on an hourly basis for usage. Monitoring - within the VPSA appliance, customers can monitor their own CPU, memory and I/O usage as well as performance on individual volumes. Unified Storage - VPSA supports both NAS and SAN protocols. Storage Tiering - VPSA utilises solid state and spinning hard drive media. Data Protection - VPSA provides remote mirroring across Cloud Service Provider data centres and asynchronous replication (for example AWS US-West & US-East regions). Data can also be protected locally using clones and snapshots of volumes.
Configuration Options VPSAs are available in four sizes, depending on the processor and memory capacity, with each successive increment doubling the one before: • Baby - one CPU, 4GB RAM, up to 5 drives ($0.49/hr) • Basic - two CPU, 8GB RAM, up to 10 drives ($0.99/hr) • Boost - four CPU, 16GB RAM, up to 20 drives ($1.99/hr) • Blazing - eight CPU, 32GB RAM, up to 40 drives ($3.99/hr) Prices (shown and correct as of 30 January 2014) scale with capacity and are charged on an hourly basis. For NetApp deployments, servers are specified slightly differently, based on IOPS requirements: • Baby vServer - 1000 IOPS, up to 5 drives ($1.99/hr) • Basic vServer - 2000 IOPS, up to 10 drives ($3.99/hr) • Boost vServer - 4000 IOPS, up to 20 drives ($7.99/hr) • Blazing vServer - 8000 IOPS, up to 80 drives ($15.99/hr) Disks within each VPSA are then added on at additional cost. Disk capacity can be added using a mix of solid state and traditional spinning drives, with typical options including 300GB 15K
SAS, 100GB SSD and 3TB SATA, although specific drive availability varies by location. NetApp deployments use only SATA drives. Disk configurations are treated like traditional arrays with a mix of RAID-10, RAID-5 & RAID-6 configurations, based on the number of disks available. A VPSA can be changed at any stage to upgrade the CPU capacity (based on the fixed size options), increase the amount of cache or to add extra disks. These then all attract the additional hourly charge.
Partners Zadara has relationships with the following service providers, offering VPSA services in the data centres listed. • Amazon Web Services (US-West, US-East, Europe (Ireland) and Japan) • CloudSigma • Dimension Data • Eircom (Ireland) • Equinix (Washington DC and Silicon Valley) • KVH (Tokyo) Zadara is also listed as an AWS Technology Partner and has a relationship with NetApp to provide a technology called Zadara elastic NetApp Private Storage (NPS) for AWS.
Reporting/Monitoring A solution couldn’t be correctly classed as a service if it didn’t include metering, reporting and monitoring features. VPSA provides full monitoring/metering for each volume with an audit log of all activities applied to the volume itself. Metering is also available on pools, RAID groups and physical disks, allowing each piece of the infrastructure to be analysed; a feature that is important in larger implementations.
Billing VPSAs are charged by the hour based the figures already quoted, with price based on the array type and the quantity of disks deployed.
Copyright © 2014 Langton Blue Ltd
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Opinion Zadara have taken the position that the only way of guaranteeing storage I/O performance in a Cloud Computing environment is to use dedicated hardware resources for each customer. In some respects this can be seen as "old school", as cloud service providers should be expected to be able to deliver storage within cloud environments using commodity hardware to guaranteed service levels. However to date, service providers have focused purely on matching capacity and bandwidth or throughput (IOPS), without any guarantee of latency (response time). These service levels are set against strict boundaries, which indicate that the service providers are delivering their service using a small number of fixed hardware configurations. Zadara is filling a gap by offering dedicated hardware resources with additional "traditional" features such as array-based replication. This can make moving existing applications into the cloud more appealing as the migration process doesn't necessarily involve a huge re-write of existing processes. However, over time, as cloud service providers evolve their storage offerings and they become more mature, storage will be delivered with more precise service metrics, including latency, IOPS and throughput. At that point, Zadara's technology may well become obsolete. There are also other competitors to the Zadara offering; customers may choose to build their own storage servers in the cloud using some of the existing open source platforms such as Ceph and Red Hat Storage Server. Whilst these offerings don't necessarily come with dedicated hardware, they could be deployed on dedicated equipment. At the moment though, Zadara has significant maturity benefits over these kinds of solutions. Zadara's current implementation tests the waters on whether customers are interested in using traditional storage in public cloud infrastructure. As the majority of the intellectual property is in the software, in the future Zadara could amend their offering to be more flexible in terms of processor and memory resources. They could also choose to create an “on-premises” offering which would make it easer for customers to migrate data into the public cloud and transform their private cloud storage. Currently this is a solid product with a mature range of features and fits well into cloud storage deployments.
More Information • •
Review: Zadara Storage Virtual Private Storage Array (Architecting IT Blog) Zadara Storage Inc (Architecting IT Codex)
The Author Chris M Evans has worked in the technology industry since 1987, starting as a systems programmer on the IBM mainframe platform, while retaining an interest in storage. After working abroad, he co-founded an Internet-based music distribution company during the .com era, returning to consultancy in the new millennium. In 2009 he co-founded Langton Blue Ltd (www.langtonblue.com), a boutique consultancy firm focused on delivering business benefit through efficient technology deployments. Chris writes a popular blog at http://blog.architecting.it, attends many conferences and invitation-only events and can be found providing regular industry contributions through Twitter (@chrismevans) and other social media outlets. No guarantees or warranties are provided regarding the accuracy, reliability or usability of any information contained within this document and readers are recommended to validate any statements or other representations made for validity. Copyright© 2014 Langton Blue Ltd. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may be reproduced without the prior written consent of Langton Blue Ltd. Details are subject to change without notice. All brands and trademarks of the respective owners are recognised as such.
