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.